This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice.
Far out on the Scatter, past the place where the trade-lanes thin and give out, the crew of the space barge The Marigold come upon a thing adrift in the cold void: a small worn machine, wiped nearly to nothing, still turning one faithful light toward a bearing it can no longer name. This is the cozy science fiction comfort read about flying it the long way home.

The little unit can form almost nothing. No name, no course, no memory of where it came from or who is waiting; only one word, Rennick, made with great effort, and under the word one fixed and unbroken wish that Bart, machine to machine, reads whole where no human can: it wants to get home. Word of a derelict adrift where the routes give out brings Odell Vane, the lanes’ finalisation assessor, up the dark in his own cutter, and for once his verdict is reached out of pity rather than tidiness. A machine wiped past memory, with no home it can name and no course it can hold, is a lost cause, and the kindest thing is to close it gently, a clean ending given with dignity, rather than send it chasing a bearing it can never reach.

But robot wrangler Roy will not call a machine a lost cause before anyone has gone the long way and asked it what it is doing. A broken loop wanders or stops; this one steers. That is not a fault. That is a promise, kept so long that the keeping outlasted the memory of what was promised. So Roy declines the merciful verdict and sets The Marigold to fly the little unit’s own fading drift-trail back the way it drifted, jump by jump and waystation by waystation, to find where the one word points before the light goes out. The finalisation order rides behind them the whole voyage, in Vane’s hand and never his fist, as he follows the trail in his own cutter, half hoping to be proven wrong.