Renegade

BEYOND ROBOT CITY, BEYOND AURORA, AWAITS A BRAVE NEW GALAXY OF ROBOTS AND ALIENS

His name is Derec. Summoned to an uncharted planet, he has discovered an incredible new robotic intelligence that threatens to violate the Three Laws of Robotics! Her name is Ariel. On the trail of Derec, her lover, she finds herself the sole human on a planet of positronic robots and an alien race of shocking intelligence. Can Derec and Ariel solve the mysteries of the robots and the aliens in time to stop an all-out war?

Cordell Scotten's first story, "The Hijacking of the Pony Express" in Analog for February 1989, to his novel a few months later, a Tie to the Isaac Asimov's Robot City Shared World series, Isaac Asimov's Robot City: Robots and Aliens 2: Renegade (1989), which interestingly has three Robots whose task it is to determine why (and ultimately whether) only biological humans should evoke for them the three Laws of Robotics.