Robot Wrangler Roy and The Tin Soldier

You will expect a marching automaton. You will find a child's tin soldier no longer than a thumb, his paint worn grey, his ankle mended with a careful bead of solder.

The barge The Marigold puts down on Bellow's Pile, a working junk-moon run by one colossal sorting-robot. Its job was to crush a dozen worlds' cast-offs to scrap. Decades ago, quietly, it stopped, and kept it all instead: a wall of single boots, buttons by the bin-load, broken toys mended and shelved by the size of the child who lost them.

Now the owners want the hoard cleared and the robot reset before the ore-run, and the clock is real. But Roy will not call a machine broken before anyone has gone in and asked it why.

Warm, gently funny, full of heart. A standalone adventure; read in any order.