![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
3.
Nathan let his annoyance get the better of him and clunked about channeling his frustration against the handcuffs for a while. But he could not catch them on the rail and pull them off, even over his damaged hand, and the act of picking a lock required the finesse of human touch. The array of tools available on Duke Crocker's airship taunted him, but he lacked the fine motor skills and joint mobility to attempt engaging them while his hands were tethered, one damaged and the other winding down. In the end, he was forced to give up on his freedom and pay attention to the duty assigned to him. After all, he did not want to be destroyed if the unmarked planes returned, any more than airship captain and fugitive did.
A shared goal -- negative goal -- did not stop the situation being frustrating in the extreme. His police duties were supposed to take precedence. On the other hand, he had been created for rational decision making, and there was no point asserting potentially deadly force to capture the airship when he couldn't return it to Command in the absence of Crocker's cooperation anyway.
The night rolled by above, and the clouds, shifting and dense, grey like creatures in the darkness, were something to behold this high up. Nathan had never really flown before. He'd seen these great vehicles sidling through the sky every day of his existence as a matter of routine. He'd issued parking tickets for them, but he'd barely ever set a foot aboard.
They were heading far out of the range of life as he had known it, now.
He made another circuit of the deck. Not so much because he thought it was necessary to check the perimeter and stare off the sides in a search for obstruction or threat, but because it enthralled him to do so. Garland Wuornos, his human mentor on the force -- his ‘father' in Heppa law, subsequently, since he'd gifted Nathan his surname -- had always said that they didn't make his kind with curiosity in mind, that it was a malfunction. Nathan had never been sure how to take that, but had decided he meant it well.
The rest of his automated brethren would have shot Crocker, or crushed his larynx in the first instance, and taken Audrey back, of that he was sure. Back there, they had been close enough for the tower to send someone out in a one-man dirigible, someone who could manoeuvre the greater airship back into dock as Nathan could not. But he did not really think it was logic that had stopped him.
Something else had, and he didn't know what. Some inexplicable caution, when it came to Crocker. A familiarity that lay in the push-and-pull of their exchanges even when those exchanges were bitter arguments.
It was alike to the way that Audrey Parker's touch echoed strangely in him, as though it was something he had felt once before and forgotten. Which was a ridiculous contention, because she could not call life back to metal skin that had never had life, engage a nervous system that had never existed.
But both of them, here and now, made the priorities of the world he knew seem secondary. He had not killed Duke, though the option had been there. It would have been acceptable in the remit of his mission, given the manner the privateer captain was hindering a fugitive's capture and posing a threat to Nathan's person. He had also actively protected the life of Audrey Parker, and while apprehending the target alive and intact was always preferred, there were no specific instructions that named that outcome essential.
Time passed, and Nathan contemplated the stars through a gap in the clouds, as he had through the skylight window of Garland Wuornos' attic room, once, before his human mentor died and he had moved into lodgings owned by the police department, which were small and bland with no such views.
Eventually, the stairs rattled as Crocker ascended from below deck.
"Just checking you're still here." Crocker didn't like him. Crocker was a criminal and therefore by default, Nathan didn't like him back, no matter what strange familiarities stirred in the depths of his mechanical brain.
Where would I go? Nathan watched, irked, as Duke made all the checks that he had periodically been doing, and then some more of the particular workings of the vessel Nathan lacked any understanding of. "The airship seems to be running efficiently," Nathan prompted.
"Yeah," Duke said, with a trace of reluctance. Maybe the reluctance was just for talking to Nathan. "She seems to have weathered the excitement."
"Where is Miss Parker? Parker," Nathan dared to ask, and then corrected himself.
"Asleep. Exhausted. I'd rather catch up when I know it's safe, and the Rouge is either drifting in a designated safe lane or at port." He eyed Nathan, his face shifting with conflicting thoughts. There were dark patches under his eyes and a bruise in the shape of a mechanical hand on his throat that Nathan was not, in the face of his own damage tally, prepared to feel guilty for. "Do you play cards?"
"Excuse me?"
"Cards. A game, you know? Do you... people... even play games? Are there things you do in your downtime that aren't 'work'? Or do they just work you all the hours of the day? Or stand you in a cupboard to chill?"
That was offensive, and Nathan bristled. "I can play cards." Garland had used to play with his police friends, one night every week. Back then, a decade ago when Nathan was new, there had still been a lot more living officers on Heppa's police force. Nathan had other ways of passing the time, now that Garland was gone and many of the flesh and blood policemen in lower ranking positions had been manoeuvred into retirement as had become Heppa's policy since the automation. "I'm not sure why I should play cards with you," Nathan added.
"It'll keep me awake." Duke pulled a face. "Should be interesting. I've never played against a machine before."
"I've never played against a crook," Nathan said, holding out his cuffed hands.
Duke frowned at them. "No. Besides, Audrey has the keys and I'm not waking her."
"My left hand has not been functional for the last hour," Nathan said, leaving his arms extended as they were. "Manipulating small squares of paper will require manual dexterity and both hands, if you expect to play with any degree of speed."
"Oh, fine," Duke grumbled, and Nathan's spirits lifted. He would not be reliant on the goodwill of the fugitives for his continued ability to move, and all that was required in exchange was to thrash the criminal in a simple game. "Don't you start thinking this means I like you."
Duke reached of his own volition for the key Nathan had taken out for Audrey's use earlier, turning Nathan's wrist to peel it from the indentation where it was housed. His fingers moved like someone used to working with machinery, brusque movements without fanfare or fuss. Nathan fought down a truly irrational urge to shiver as Duke slotted the key into the elbow of his undamaged arm and turned it.
Duke was standing very close against his back, one arm curled around him to hold both his hands still with a grip on the cuffs as he worked at Nathan's elbow. It was said that future automata might be able to process tactile information, with sensor gages that would indicate proximity, touch, or degrees of pressure. Nathan lacked such things, except for a trio of very rudimentary pressure sensors in the tips of the first two fingers and thumb of his right hand for delicate work, but his eyes, ears and brain told him that Duke was standing very close, the breath hitching in his sore throat next to Nathan's ear.
He was not used to someone else doing this, that was all this strange feeling was, Nathan told himself. He was not used to having living people so close to him (although yet again, in the back of his mind, some niggling doubt made its protests that the closeness and intimacy he was experiencing really wasn't unfamiliar).
The key clunked to a halt and Duke withdrew it. Nathan waggled his functional fingers. Duke looked at them dubiously and then dropped the key into his hand, backing off fast. Duke was far more nervous of him than Audrey was. Then again, Duke had earned the marks to prove Nathan was a threat to him. "Good enough?" the privateer asked, belligerently.
"I shall do my best to humiliate you at your chosen game," Nathan reassured him.
"Oh, the confidence," Duke mocked.
They settled in the galley immediately below the set of steps Duke had come up, at opposite sides of the small dinner table, where Duke Crocker proceeded to be annoyingly adept at cards, with a penchant for moves that didn't always follow in the strictest sense as the most rational move for the circumstance, making him difficult to predict. Nathan had to focus to hold his own.
"It's boring playing without stakes," Duke said after a while. "How about we make it interesting?"
"You already took my money," Nathan said, balefully.
"I can get it," Duke pondered. "I suppose we could strip -- it's a bit cold, but since I'm fairly confident it won't be me getting to feel it, and you can't... Still, not much in it for anyone, either, with nothing underneath there but metal and gears." Grinning, he reached across and, before it was possible to raise bound hands to stop him, slapped Nathan's chest. The resulting fwupp seemed to disappoint by having not the faintest hint of a metallic echo. Packed into that part of Nathan's chest cavity was the complicated array of tonal tubes that enabled him to speak, and the inflating bladder that gave air to his voice.
Nathan caught Duke's wrist as he pulled back, shoving it away harder. "Don't do that." A flinch travelled through the other man, informing him that wrist was still very sore. Nathan uncurled his fingers swiftly, but he had no intention of apologising to a criminal who insisted upon keeping him in restraints, even if the game so far had been moderately civilised.
Duke rubbed at his wrist. "Don't hope that that's going to give you any advantage." A scowl hung between them for a moment. Then Duke said, "Beans," and got up and pulled a large, rattling can from a cupboard. He removed the lid, wincing from the effect of the movement on his wrist, and tipped a pile of dried beans on the table. Nathan blinked at them, not being very learned about food products, but got the idea when Duke slid back into his chair and started separating the pile into two piles, counting the beans out.
"I see." Nathan nodded and scraped the nearest pile toward him, cradled between his cuffed hands.
The game slipped into a sort of easy rhythm, after the initial stages of awkwardness, in a fashion that surprised him. He had not played socially for some time. There was a tendency for the remaining living officers to be rather frosty, even -- especially -- to the higher spec automata, as Heppa had rolled out its plans to replace more of them, to the point where Nathan knew he was not welcome among their social gatherings. The interactions of his fellow automata were friendlier, but limited and predictable. Even, somehow, the models who should be equivalent in spec to himself. Garland had been unconventional, so it seemed likely his teacher was responsible.
The familiarity of the back and forth with Duke as they played, he put down to those old games with Garland and his buddies, back when he was a novelty and living and automated policemen could still be friends.
About forty minutes in, with their bean hills still frustratingly equal and Nathan blaming his distraction for that, Duke stood up. "I'm going up to do a check of the boat again, which means so are you. Come on."
His hand twitched, but he didn't this time move in to grab at Nathan. Nathan wordlessly got up, and trailed after him like a clockwork satellite at the planetarium he sometimes visited on his downtime, climbing the ladders awkwardly with his restrained hands bunched doubly around the rungs.
He had questions aplenty about how the airship functioned as he shadowed its owner's checks, but since Duke would only scoff and refuse to give out the information if he showed his interest, Nathan settled for watching closely and did not ask.
He did ask, as he was standing contemplating the thick cloud they had sought out, "Isn't it dangerous to fly like this, unable to detect other vehicles in the sky?" In the darkness, it almost blocked visibility for all but tens of feet around them, and even made it difficult to move on the deck, cluttered as it was with bulky shapes and obstacles.
Duke glared at him in the greenish light of a chemically powered deck lamp. He'd purposely dulled the few deck lights he'd left lit to this level before they went below earlier. "With the police and whoever else is after us, I'll take the chance." He added, sarcastically, "Nice that you're concerned."
"It's reckless," Nathan said. "You could kill us and who knows who else."
"No-one else up here, unless they're as reckless as I am," Duke said, quirking an eyebrow. "What do you care anyway?"
"The safety of the transport ways for citizens is--"
"We're not in Heppa now," Duke said with a rasp of exasperation in his voice. "You can quit the good little toy soldier act. Oh, wait, it's probably in your programming, right?"
"I am not programmed," Nathan said, "Except with mathematical and scientific information about the world to form the base of my intellect. Science has not yet discovered a method to adequately store such varied and subtle patterns of information required for the understanding of people that is necessary to function at the demanding level of my role. My memory is therefore an enspelled reserve, and I was taught how to behave as a police officer."
Duke choked. "That's really fascinating." He turned his back rudely to deal with a piece of machinery. A moment later, he turned again, his eyes a bit wild. "Is that true for the--?" He made a gesture next to his own head that Nathan took to mean the stupid ones, and re-interpreted to mean the regular police automata.
"Not precisely," Nathan said, annoyed. "I am more complex than they are. Yet they have their own identities and memories, too, and if you're feeling guilty about the manner of discovering your method to dispose of one of our number, then you should."
"I'm not guilty," Duke scowled, but his whole stance had stiffened and gone defensive. "Those damn machines -- the lot of you -- are a plague in Heppa. All so bent around the letter of the law that you can't give anyone a break, not even the penniless kids on the street who you bust for loitering. I know how you guys deal with the lowest rungs of the regular citizenry. Maybe they don't send you down there, since they've got you all prettied up like that. With your posh clothes and nice manners, I bet you deal with the upper crust on Heppa's societal sewer."
Nathan looked down at his outfit, which the criminal had indicated with a derisive sweep of one hand. It was rumpled and untidy, the shirt torn and suit begrimed from clinging to the side of the vessel earlier, and it had bullet holes in it. His rolled up, torn sleeve above the strip of white bandaging that was holding his arm casing together did not look tidy. There was a smudge of oil on his vest. The ensemble had been expensive, and had involved an unpleasant conversation to persuade a reputable tailor to make the fine fitting adjustments for an automaton. The man had not been best pleased at the kind of advertisement one of Nathan's ilk provided by wearing it. Nathan wasn't best pleased by the state it was now left in.
"My clothes were not provided to me," he said. "I wasn't required to wear a police uniform, only to dress respectably. I chose this."
Duke's eyebrows went up, and Nathan couldn't help but read that as mockery.
"I'm a regular detective," Nathan said. "General crimes division." He frowned and thought about what Duke had said before. "The first models of police automata were more rigid than those today." He made some calculations based on the other man's age. "That would have been twenty to... perhaps twenty-five years ago, if they rolled the prototypes out in your district. You had a regrettable encounter?"
"Tin Man, my whole life has been a series of regrettable encounters with the law." Duke shook his head like he was shaking the thought off. "Don't sweat it." He pulled a face. "Don't take that literally and tell me you don't sweat."
"No." Although such oddities of speech had taken a while to get used to, he'd conquered that obstacle years back. "Of course, even if you did have an encounter with an automated law officer who could not see beyond the rules to the situation and the individuals, that would not excuse any real criminal acts committed--"
"Oh my God." Duke turned away again in disgust. "You say they make you guys 'better' these days, but some things never change. Shut the fuck up. There's no good reason I have to listen to you talking."
Nathan paused on the verge of making the stand that there was nothing the crook could do to stop him talking, but that statement was only temporarily true. While he was dependant on someone else to wind up half of his clockwork functions, it was wiser to exercise caution.
Instead, he trailed behind Duke again through the rest of his check of the boat. Duke was twitchy and kept looking over his shoulder, maintaining a wary distance between himself and Nathan as though Nathan might take the chance to push him overboard. As if having risked his life to save one criminal today, he would pointlessly and maliciously murder another.
The clouds made eerie shadows as they passed through them, and it almost seemed they curled and roiled disturbingly, forming ominous shapes. Nathan had never had this view of the night, surreal and otherworldly enough to cause a hitch in his gears.
"We're all checked," Duke said, hand clinging onto a rope that led up into the mesh of the airbag, coming up from leaning low over the side after a remarkable show of appearing to keep one eye on Nathan throughout the manoeuvre. "We can go back down."
Nathan was silent through the descent, peeved and unsettled by both the situation and the criminal. It felt dangerous to be adrift up here, away from Command and Heppa and everything covered by the fixed data of his life so far. Being with these people was as jarring in some ways as it was strangely enlivening in others. He couldn't help but wonder -- as he usually made a point of trying not to -- if one of his living colleagues would have been better suited to handle this.
Below deck once again, they passed a few further hours in oddly companionable, oddly hostile gaming. Initially upon their return, Nathan was thrilled to find his bean pile start to fast outstrip Duke's, and he threw himself into winning as a subtle revenge. Then Duke proved himself quite able to dig in and fight back.
It was abundantly clear the airship captain had no intention of going to sleep and leaving Nathan as the only watchful, wakeful pair of eyes on his vessel. As the night wore on toward the small hours of morning, and onward still, Nathan started morosely fretting for his diminishing bean pile. His spirits rose, though, as Duke had a run of bad luck that left them even again.
An amused throat cleared behind him. Duke's head jerked up from his focus on trying to cheat, looking slightly alarmed to have been caught so engrossed, and Nathan turned more slowly. He was usually good at sensing tiny cues, but he did not know how long Parker had been standing there.
She had her arms folded but her eyes were light. She looked much more alert and alive than the weary woman of earlier. "This is what you've been doing all night?"
"What else?" asked Duke, shiftily. He stumbled as he rose from his chair. His eyes had been drooping distinctly in the last hour. "I'll check up top again, and then--" He stopped, looking dubiously between Parker and Nathan.
"Do that and then get some sleep," she told him. "I can't watch the airship, but I can watch him. Unless you don't trust me with your haul." She waved at the bean pile.
"We're still drifting through cloud," Duke said. "I'll let you know if anything's changed. Otherwise I'll wake to check things again in an hour." He stumbled out.
Nathan found himself watching the other man's retreating back for a second, before he caught himself and returned his attention to Audrey Parker.
"You look much refreshed," he said, and had to resist an impulse to arrange his face into a smile.
Hers in return was somewhat crooked. "That would be the last two days spent running and hiding from your police."
Nathan opened his mouth, but couldn't muster words, so just got up to hold her chair back for her. He spluttered in outrage, his gears grating, as she used the chance to peek at his cards. "We're starting a new game!"
"Gentleman enough to pull back the chair, but not gentleman enough to fake ignorance and let a lady cheat gracefully, huh?" she asked, with a cheeky challenge that was unlike any tone he could remember hearing from a woman before.
"Duke was cheating," Nathan pointed out. "I'm sure that you are... different."
She leaned in to him as he moved around the table and hissed the reminder, "I'm still wanted by the police, remember?"
"Yes, but. But you don't know why. You have no memory. This could all be a mix-up. Perhaps you're only a witness to a crime. It could be you're wanted in custody for your own protection, if there are others who want to kill you. Enemies powerful enough to have advanced armed airplanes when even the authorities don't--"
"Are you making excuses for a criminal, Mr Regulations?"
Nathan had already gone through all of that with Duke, and had no desire to re-tread the same ground so soon. It wasn't as though his words had convinced Duke. Deciding it was easier to give them the machine they expected, he cast her a neutral look and didn't answer.
She appeared disappointed. Then, as she watched him shuffle the cards, she exclaimed with a scandalized air, "He wound your other arm. For the sake of cards, that hypocrite!"
"Yes. I should be good for around twenty-four hours now, depending on how much activity I'm required to undertake." Usually it was something he did every morning and evening. He hadn't really faced the risk of running down before. It was always easy, after all, even when working late or working through the night, to take a few discreet minutes to wind. Far easier to accommodate into a tight schedule than the inconveniences of sleep and the need for sustenance.
"Well, good," Parker said. "For cards? Really." She was displeased with Duke, which made Nathan smugly content.
"Let's play," he told her eagerly. He had been enjoying the game with Duke, despite everything, and his opinion of her was rather better.
"You're happy," she accused. "You actually want to play."
It didn't make much sense, so Nathan ducked his head, fixed his eyes to the cards, and focused in place of reply.
She huffed at him, as if poised to say something more.
Then, a shout and a loud slam reverberated down from above deck. Both of them jerked to their feet, Nathan's chair falling. "Do you have a weapon?" he asked as they raced for the ladder, and her hand strayed to a lump in her dress as she nodded.
"You go first," Nathan urged. She was already in the lead, and his cuffed hands would slow him down on the ladder.
He could hear Duke yelling like a madman: frantic, urgent. Yelling for both of them, as if their names fit together perfectly on his tongue, and Nathan wasn't sure why he should feel his gears crunch faster for the urgency of the privateer who had almost killed him barely ten hours before. Perhaps it was simply his own experience and training, a crisis response that had become automatic.
Parker disappeared over the lip at the top of the steep steps. The hatch onto the sky showed an orange haze behind the clouds, an unusually high-up perspective on the dawn. Nathan hauled himself the last few steps with guilty speed because he did not like it that Parker had gone beyond his sight. She was armed, but there were too many unpleasant possibilities for what could be happening out there.
The dawn provided an eerie glow. Everything was reduced to grey and black shadows superimposed over that orange blur. Nathan saw people-shapes moving among the shadows: more than two and none wearing the distinctive outline of a dress. Someone tried to strike him from behind as he scrambled upright, but the blow only reverberated off the side of his head and did nothing to jar his mechanisms, this time. It did, however, ring out unmistakably metallic.
"Aut'n!" a voice behind him shouted, as he spun to face his attacker, a large man wielding a length of iron pole. "We've got an aut'n!"
"Then we're in the money even if we can't sell this heap of junk!" a voice replied from deeper in the shadows. "Secure it!"
The fellow didn't respond, except for the "Glurk!" sound he made as Nathan slammed him with both cuffed fists and he fell like a stone. The idea of being sold made Nathan unhesitantly vicious. It seemed Crocker's words about his value outside of Heppa had been correct. Nathan had no intention of letting anyone reduce him to parts, or worse, some kind of slave.
"Duke!" he yelled into the gloom. "Parker!" His voice choked as he looked up.
Above the airship, coiled beyond the floating airbags, another airship had latched on. This one wasn't styled like a sailing boat, more a heap of salvaged parts strung together by tape and crossed fingers, by the look of things, but it was all too clear what it represented. Ropes hitched it onto the Rouge and ropes coiled down to let more shadowy figures arc down to the Rouge's deck. One came down as Nathan watched, shadow arm rising to level a gun.
Nathan averted his head and ran at the figure as it touched deck. The shot staggered his forward progress, but no more than that. He struck the newcomer with the club of his joined fists, and took the gun from him.
He was armed. Now he needed to find Audrey Parker and gain his freedom from the restraints so he could fight...
"What's going on, Duke? What is this?" He still could not see her, but her voice carrying from out of the gloom was infinitely reassuring, even when it sounded out of breath and confused.
"Sky pirates." Hearing Duke's voice, responding with the huff of exertion that suggested he was mid-fight, was oddly also reassuring -- though his declaration was not. "We're being attacked by sky pirates!"
Nathan let his annoyance get the better of him and clunked about channeling his frustration against the handcuffs for a while. But he could not catch them on the rail and pull them off, even over his damaged hand, and the act of picking a lock required the finesse of human touch. The array of tools available on Duke Crocker's airship taunted him, but he lacked the fine motor skills and joint mobility to attempt engaging them while his hands were tethered, one damaged and the other winding down. In the end, he was forced to give up on his freedom and pay attention to the duty assigned to him. After all, he did not want to be destroyed if the unmarked planes returned, any more than airship captain and fugitive did.
A shared goal -- negative goal -- did not stop the situation being frustrating in the extreme. His police duties were supposed to take precedence. On the other hand, he had been created for rational decision making, and there was no point asserting potentially deadly force to capture the airship when he couldn't return it to Command in the absence of Crocker's cooperation anyway.
The night rolled by above, and the clouds, shifting and dense, grey like creatures in the darkness, were something to behold this high up. Nathan had never really flown before. He'd seen these great vehicles sidling through the sky every day of his existence as a matter of routine. He'd issued parking tickets for them, but he'd barely ever set a foot aboard.
They were heading far out of the range of life as he had known it, now.
He made another circuit of the deck. Not so much because he thought it was necessary to check the perimeter and stare off the sides in a search for obstruction or threat, but because it enthralled him to do so. Garland Wuornos, his human mentor on the force -- his ‘father' in Heppa law, subsequently, since he'd gifted Nathan his surname -- had always said that they didn't make his kind with curiosity in mind, that it was a malfunction. Nathan had never been sure how to take that, but had decided he meant it well.
The rest of his automated brethren would have shot Crocker, or crushed his larynx in the first instance, and taken Audrey back, of that he was sure. Back there, they had been close enough for the tower to send someone out in a one-man dirigible, someone who could manoeuvre the greater airship back into dock as Nathan could not. But he did not really think it was logic that had stopped him.
Something else had, and he didn't know what. Some inexplicable caution, when it came to Crocker. A familiarity that lay in the push-and-pull of their exchanges even when those exchanges were bitter arguments.
It was alike to the way that Audrey Parker's touch echoed strangely in him, as though it was something he had felt once before and forgotten. Which was a ridiculous contention, because she could not call life back to metal skin that had never had life, engage a nervous system that had never existed.
But both of them, here and now, made the priorities of the world he knew seem secondary. He had not killed Duke, though the option had been there. It would have been acceptable in the remit of his mission, given the manner the privateer captain was hindering a fugitive's capture and posing a threat to Nathan's person. He had also actively protected the life of Audrey Parker, and while apprehending the target alive and intact was always preferred, there were no specific instructions that named that outcome essential.
Time passed, and Nathan contemplated the stars through a gap in the clouds, as he had through the skylight window of Garland Wuornos' attic room, once, before his human mentor died and he had moved into lodgings owned by the police department, which were small and bland with no such views.
Eventually, the stairs rattled as Crocker ascended from below deck.
"Just checking you're still here." Crocker didn't like him. Crocker was a criminal and therefore by default, Nathan didn't like him back, no matter what strange familiarities stirred in the depths of his mechanical brain.
Where would I go? Nathan watched, irked, as Duke made all the checks that he had periodically been doing, and then some more of the particular workings of the vessel Nathan lacked any understanding of. "The airship seems to be running efficiently," Nathan prompted.
"Yeah," Duke said, with a trace of reluctance. Maybe the reluctance was just for talking to Nathan. "She seems to have weathered the excitement."
"Where is Miss Parker? Parker," Nathan dared to ask, and then corrected himself.
"Asleep. Exhausted. I'd rather catch up when I know it's safe, and the Rouge is either drifting in a designated safe lane or at port." He eyed Nathan, his face shifting with conflicting thoughts. There were dark patches under his eyes and a bruise in the shape of a mechanical hand on his throat that Nathan was not, in the face of his own damage tally, prepared to feel guilty for. "Do you play cards?"
"Excuse me?"
"Cards. A game, you know? Do you... people... even play games? Are there things you do in your downtime that aren't 'work'? Or do they just work you all the hours of the day? Or stand you in a cupboard to chill?"
That was offensive, and Nathan bristled. "I can play cards." Garland had used to play with his police friends, one night every week. Back then, a decade ago when Nathan was new, there had still been a lot more living officers on Heppa's police force. Nathan had other ways of passing the time, now that Garland was gone and many of the flesh and blood policemen in lower ranking positions had been manoeuvred into retirement as had become Heppa's policy since the automation. "I'm not sure why I should play cards with you," Nathan added.
"It'll keep me awake." Duke pulled a face. "Should be interesting. I've never played against a machine before."
"I've never played against a crook," Nathan said, holding out his cuffed hands.
Duke frowned at them. "No. Besides, Audrey has the keys and I'm not waking her."
"My left hand has not been functional for the last hour," Nathan said, leaving his arms extended as they were. "Manipulating small squares of paper will require manual dexterity and both hands, if you expect to play with any degree of speed."
"Oh, fine," Duke grumbled, and Nathan's spirits lifted. He would not be reliant on the goodwill of the fugitives for his continued ability to move, and all that was required in exchange was to thrash the criminal in a simple game. "Don't you start thinking this means I like you."
Duke reached of his own volition for the key Nathan had taken out for Audrey's use earlier, turning Nathan's wrist to peel it from the indentation where it was housed. His fingers moved like someone used to working with machinery, brusque movements without fanfare or fuss. Nathan fought down a truly irrational urge to shiver as Duke slotted the key into the elbow of his undamaged arm and turned it.
Duke was standing very close against his back, one arm curled around him to hold both his hands still with a grip on the cuffs as he worked at Nathan's elbow. It was said that future automata might be able to process tactile information, with sensor gages that would indicate proximity, touch, or degrees of pressure. Nathan lacked such things, except for a trio of very rudimentary pressure sensors in the tips of the first two fingers and thumb of his right hand for delicate work, but his eyes, ears and brain told him that Duke was standing very close, the breath hitching in his sore throat next to Nathan's ear.
He was not used to someone else doing this, that was all this strange feeling was, Nathan told himself. He was not used to having living people so close to him (although yet again, in the back of his mind, some niggling doubt made its protests that the closeness and intimacy he was experiencing really wasn't unfamiliar).
The key clunked to a halt and Duke withdrew it. Nathan waggled his functional fingers. Duke looked at them dubiously and then dropped the key into his hand, backing off fast. Duke was far more nervous of him than Audrey was. Then again, Duke had earned the marks to prove Nathan was a threat to him. "Good enough?" the privateer asked, belligerently.
"I shall do my best to humiliate you at your chosen game," Nathan reassured him.
"Oh, the confidence," Duke mocked.
They settled in the galley immediately below the set of steps Duke had come up, at opposite sides of the small dinner table, where Duke Crocker proceeded to be annoyingly adept at cards, with a penchant for moves that didn't always follow in the strictest sense as the most rational move for the circumstance, making him difficult to predict. Nathan had to focus to hold his own.
"It's boring playing without stakes," Duke said after a while. "How about we make it interesting?"
"You already took my money," Nathan said, balefully.
"I can get it," Duke pondered. "I suppose we could strip -- it's a bit cold, but since I'm fairly confident it won't be me getting to feel it, and you can't... Still, not much in it for anyone, either, with nothing underneath there but metal and gears." Grinning, he reached across and, before it was possible to raise bound hands to stop him, slapped Nathan's chest. The resulting fwupp seemed to disappoint by having not the faintest hint of a metallic echo. Packed into that part of Nathan's chest cavity was the complicated array of tonal tubes that enabled him to speak, and the inflating bladder that gave air to his voice.
Nathan caught Duke's wrist as he pulled back, shoving it away harder. "Don't do that." A flinch travelled through the other man, informing him that wrist was still very sore. Nathan uncurled his fingers swiftly, but he had no intention of apologising to a criminal who insisted upon keeping him in restraints, even if the game so far had been moderately civilised.
Duke rubbed at his wrist. "Don't hope that that's going to give you any advantage." A scowl hung between them for a moment. Then Duke said, "Beans," and got up and pulled a large, rattling can from a cupboard. He removed the lid, wincing from the effect of the movement on his wrist, and tipped a pile of dried beans on the table. Nathan blinked at them, not being very learned about food products, but got the idea when Duke slid back into his chair and started separating the pile into two piles, counting the beans out.
"I see." Nathan nodded and scraped the nearest pile toward him, cradled between his cuffed hands.
The game slipped into a sort of easy rhythm, after the initial stages of awkwardness, in a fashion that surprised him. He had not played socially for some time. There was a tendency for the remaining living officers to be rather frosty, even -- especially -- to the higher spec automata, as Heppa had rolled out its plans to replace more of them, to the point where Nathan knew he was not welcome among their social gatherings. The interactions of his fellow automata were friendlier, but limited and predictable. Even, somehow, the models who should be equivalent in spec to himself. Garland had been unconventional, so it seemed likely his teacher was responsible.
The familiarity of the back and forth with Duke as they played, he put down to those old games with Garland and his buddies, back when he was a novelty and living and automated policemen could still be friends.
About forty minutes in, with their bean hills still frustratingly equal and Nathan blaming his distraction for that, Duke stood up. "I'm going up to do a check of the boat again, which means so are you. Come on."
His hand twitched, but he didn't this time move in to grab at Nathan. Nathan wordlessly got up, and trailed after him like a clockwork satellite at the planetarium he sometimes visited on his downtime, climbing the ladders awkwardly with his restrained hands bunched doubly around the rungs.
He had questions aplenty about how the airship functioned as he shadowed its owner's checks, but since Duke would only scoff and refuse to give out the information if he showed his interest, Nathan settled for watching closely and did not ask.
He did ask, as he was standing contemplating the thick cloud they had sought out, "Isn't it dangerous to fly like this, unable to detect other vehicles in the sky?" In the darkness, it almost blocked visibility for all but tens of feet around them, and even made it difficult to move on the deck, cluttered as it was with bulky shapes and obstacles.
Duke glared at him in the greenish light of a chemically powered deck lamp. He'd purposely dulled the few deck lights he'd left lit to this level before they went below earlier. "With the police and whoever else is after us, I'll take the chance." He added, sarcastically, "Nice that you're concerned."
"It's reckless," Nathan said. "You could kill us and who knows who else."
"No-one else up here, unless they're as reckless as I am," Duke said, quirking an eyebrow. "What do you care anyway?"
"The safety of the transport ways for citizens is--"
"We're not in Heppa now," Duke said with a rasp of exasperation in his voice. "You can quit the good little toy soldier act. Oh, wait, it's probably in your programming, right?"
"I am not programmed," Nathan said, "Except with mathematical and scientific information about the world to form the base of my intellect. Science has not yet discovered a method to adequately store such varied and subtle patterns of information required for the understanding of people that is necessary to function at the demanding level of my role. My memory is therefore an enspelled reserve, and I was taught how to behave as a police officer."
Duke choked. "That's really fascinating." He turned his back rudely to deal with a piece of machinery. A moment later, he turned again, his eyes a bit wild. "Is that true for the--?" He made a gesture next to his own head that Nathan took to mean the stupid ones, and re-interpreted to mean the regular police automata.
"Not precisely," Nathan said, annoyed. "I am more complex than they are. Yet they have their own identities and memories, too, and if you're feeling guilty about the manner of discovering your method to dispose of one of our number, then you should."
"I'm not guilty," Duke scowled, but his whole stance had stiffened and gone defensive. "Those damn machines -- the lot of you -- are a plague in Heppa. All so bent around the letter of the law that you can't give anyone a break, not even the penniless kids on the street who you bust for loitering. I know how you guys deal with the lowest rungs of the regular citizenry. Maybe they don't send you down there, since they've got you all prettied up like that. With your posh clothes and nice manners, I bet you deal with the upper crust on Heppa's societal sewer."
Nathan looked down at his outfit, which the criminal had indicated with a derisive sweep of one hand. It was rumpled and untidy, the shirt torn and suit begrimed from clinging to the side of the vessel earlier, and it had bullet holes in it. His rolled up, torn sleeve above the strip of white bandaging that was holding his arm casing together did not look tidy. There was a smudge of oil on his vest. The ensemble had been expensive, and had involved an unpleasant conversation to persuade a reputable tailor to make the fine fitting adjustments for an automaton. The man had not been best pleased at the kind of advertisement one of Nathan's ilk provided by wearing it. Nathan wasn't best pleased by the state it was now left in.
"My clothes were not provided to me," he said. "I wasn't required to wear a police uniform, only to dress respectably. I chose this."
Duke's eyebrows went up, and Nathan couldn't help but read that as mockery.
"I'm a regular detective," Nathan said. "General crimes division." He frowned and thought about what Duke had said before. "The first models of police automata were more rigid than those today." He made some calculations based on the other man's age. "That would have been twenty to... perhaps twenty-five years ago, if they rolled the prototypes out in your district. You had a regrettable encounter?"
"Tin Man, my whole life has been a series of regrettable encounters with the law." Duke shook his head like he was shaking the thought off. "Don't sweat it." He pulled a face. "Don't take that literally and tell me you don't sweat."
"No." Although such oddities of speech had taken a while to get used to, he'd conquered that obstacle years back. "Of course, even if you did have an encounter with an automated law officer who could not see beyond the rules to the situation and the individuals, that would not excuse any real criminal acts committed--"
"Oh my God." Duke turned away again in disgust. "You say they make you guys 'better' these days, but some things never change. Shut the fuck up. There's no good reason I have to listen to you talking."
Nathan paused on the verge of making the stand that there was nothing the crook could do to stop him talking, but that statement was only temporarily true. While he was dependant on someone else to wind up half of his clockwork functions, it was wiser to exercise caution.
Instead, he trailed behind Duke again through the rest of his check of the boat. Duke was twitchy and kept looking over his shoulder, maintaining a wary distance between himself and Nathan as though Nathan might take the chance to push him overboard. As if having risked his life to save one criminal today, he would pointlessly and maliciously murder another.
The clouds made eerie shadows as they passed through them, and it almost seemed they curled and roiled disturbingly, forming ominous shapes. Nathan had never had this view of the night, surreal and otherworldly enough to cause a hitch in his gears.
"We're all checked," Duke said, hand clinging onto a rope that led up into the mesh of the airbag, coming up from leaning low over the side after a remarkable show of appearing to keep one eye on Nathan throughout the manoeuvre. "We can go back down."
Nathan was silent through the descent, peeved and unsettled by both the situation and the criminal. It felt dangerous to be adrift up here, away from Command and Heppa and everything covered by the fixed data of his life so far. Being with these people was as jarring in some ways as it was strangely enlivening in others. He couldn't help but wonder -- as he usually made a point of trying not to -- if one of his living colleagues would have been better suited to handle this.
Below deck once again, they passed a few further hours in oddly companionable, oddly hostile gaming. Initially upon their return, Nathan was thrilled to find his bean pile start to fast outstrip Duke's, and he threw himself into winning as a subtle revenge. Then Duke proved himself quite able to dig in and fight back.
It was abundantly clear the airship captain had no intention of going to sleep and leaving Nathan as the only watchful, wakeful pair of eyes on his vessel. As the night wore on toward the small hours of morning, and onward still, Nathan started morosely fretting for his diminishing bean pile. His spirits rose, though, as Duke had a run of bad luck that left them even again.
An amused throat cleared behind him. Duke's head jerked up from his focus on trying to cheat, looking slightly alarmed to have been caught so engrossed, and Nathan turned more slowly. He was usually good at sensing tiny cues, but he did not know how long Parker had been standing there.
She had her arms folded but her eyes were light. She looked much more alert and alive than the weary woman of earlier. "This is what you've been doing all night?"
"What else?" asked Duke, shiftily. He stumbled as he rose from his chair. His eyes had been drooping distinctly in the last hour. "I'll check up top again, and then--" He stopped, looking dubiously between Parker and Nathan.
"Do that and then get some sleep," she told him. "I can't watch the airship, but I can watch him. Unless you don't trust me with your haul." She waved at the bean pile.
"We're still drifting through cloud," Duke said. "I'll let you know if anything's changed. Otherwise I'll wake to check things again in an hour." He stumbled out.
Nathan found himself watching the other man's retreating back for a second, before he caught himself and returned his attention to Audrey Parker.
"You look much refreshed," he said, and had to resist an impulse to arrange his face into a smile.
Hers in return was somewhat crooked. "That would be the last two days spent running and hiding from your police."
Nathan opened his mouth, but couldn't muster words, so just got up to hold her chair back for her. He spluttered in outrage, his gears grating, as she used the chance to peek at his cards. "We're starting a new game!"
"Gentleman enough to pull back the chair, but not gentleman enough to fake ignorance and let a lady cheat gracefully, huh?" she asked, with a cheeky challenge that was unlike any tone he could remember hearing from a woman before.
"Duke was cheating," Nathan pointed out. "I'm sure that you are... different."
She leaned in to him as he moved around the table and hissed the reminder, "I'm still wanted by the police, remember?"
"Yes, but. But you don't know why. You have no memory. This could all be a mix-up. Perhaps you're only a witness to a crime. It could be you're wanted in custody for your own protection, if there are others who want to kill you. Enemies powerful enough to have advanced armed airplanes when even the authorities don't--"
"Are you making excuses for a criminal, Mr Regulations?"
Nathan had already gone through all of that with Duke, and had no desire to re-tread the same ground so soon. It wasn't as though his words had convinced Duke. Deciding it was easier to give them the machine they expected, he cast her a neutral look and didn't answer.
She appeared disappointed. Then, as she watched him shuffle the cards, she exclaimed with a scandalized air, "He wound your other arm. For the sake of cards, that hypocrite!"
"Yes. I should be good for around twenty-four hours now, depending on how much activity I'm required to undertake." Usually it was something he did every morning and evening. He hadn't really faced the risk of running down before. It was always easy, after all, even when working late or working through the night, to take a few discreet minutes to wind. Far easier to accommodate into a tight schedule than the inconveniences of sleep and the need for sustenance.
"Well, good," Parker said. "For cards? Really." She was displeased with Duke, which made Nathan smugly content.
"Let's play," he told her eagerly. He had been enjoying the game with Duke, despite everything, and his opinion of her was rather better.
"You're happy," she accused. "You actually want to play."
It didn't make much sense, so Nathan ducked his head, fixed his eyes to the cards, and focused in place of reply.
She huffed at him, as if poised to say something more.
Then, a shout and a loud slam reverberated down from above deck. Both of them jerked to their feet, Nathan's chair falling. "Do you have a weapon?" he asked as they raced for the ladder, and her hand strayed to a lump in her dress as she nodded.
"You go first," Nathan urged. She was already in the lead, and his cuffed hands would slow him down on the ladder.
He could hear Duke yelling like a madman: frantic, urgent. Yelling for both of them, as if their names fit together perfectly on his tongue, and Nathan wasn't sure why he should feel his gears crunch faster for the urgency of the privateer who had almost killed him barely ten hours before. Perhaps it was simply his own experience and training, a crisis response that had become automatic.
Parker disappeared over the lip at the top of the steep steps. The hatch onto the sky showed an orange haze behind the clouds, an unusually high-up perspective on the dawn. Nathan hauled himself the last few steps with guilty speed because he did not like it that Parker had gone beyond his sight. She was armed, but there were too many unpleasant possibilities for what could be happening out there.
The dawn provided an eerie glow. Everything was reduced to grey and black shadows superimposed over that orange blur. Nathan saw people-shapes moving among the shadows: more than two and none wearing the distinctive outline of a dress. Someone tried to strike him from behind as he scrambled upright, but the blow only reverberated off the side of his head and did nothing to jar his mechanisms, this time. It did, however, ring out unmistakably metallic.
"Aut'n!" a voice behind him shouted, as he spun to face his attacker, a large man wielding a length of iron pole. "We've got an aut'n!"
"Then we're in the money even if we can't sell this heap of junk!" a voice replied from deeper in the shadows. "Secure it!"
The fellow didn't respond, except for the "Glurk!" sound he made as Nathan slammed him with both cuffed fists and he fell like a stone. The idea of being sold made Nathan unhesitantly vicious. It seemed Crocker's words about his value outside of Heppa had been correct. Nathan had no intention of letting anyone reduce him to parts, or worse, some kind of slave.
"Duke!" he yelled into the gloom. "Parker!" His voice choked as he looked up.
Above the airship, coiled beyond the floating airbags, another airship had latched on. This one wasn't styled like a sailing boat, more a heap of salvaged parts strung together by tape and crossed fingers, by the look of things, but it was all too clear what it represented. Ropes hitched it onto the Rouge and ropes coiled down to let more shadowy figures arc down to the Rouge's deck. One came down as Nathan watched, shadow arm rising to level a gun.
Nathan averted his head and ran at the figure as it touched deck. The shot staggered his forward progress, but no more than that. He struck the newcomer with the club of his joined fists, and took the gun from him.
He was armed. Now he needed to find Audrey Parker and gain his freedom from the restraints so he could fight...
"What's going on, Duke? What is this?" He still could not see her, but her voice carrying from out of the gloom was infinitely reassuring, even when it sounded out of breath and confused.
"Sky pirates." Hearing Duke's voice, responding with the huff of exertion that suggested he was mid-fight, was oddly also reassuring -- though his declaration was not. "We're being attacked by sky pirates!"