Part 29: My Kingdom for an Ice Digger

Chapter 24: My Kingdom for an Ice Digger



We trudged on through the thick, soft snow, each step taking a little more effort than the last. I had to watch my pace: Hugh had trouble keeping up with the rest of us, and being separated from the group would be a death sentence if a blizzard struck. At least as long as we were all together, I could teleport us to relative safety if we were lost or the cold became too much for us.

The worst thing about walking through snowfields is the cold. The second-worst thing is the wind. The third-worst thing is the snow. The poisonous gas, which I could still smell even at this distance from the mine, wasn't so great either.



Killer robots, if the snowfield you're walking through happens to be full of them, come a distant fifth.



Damn it all, why were there so many robots out here? Surely they couldn't all have come from the mines. Had Mother Brain found me already, or had she just populated the entire planet with killer robots for no reason?



Also, there were more ape-things. Individually they were no threat, but they were more difficult to deal with when they attacked in packs. If only Anna was with us, she'd have made short work of them.



After hours of constant walking, stopping only to fight off robots and monsters, a town finally came into view -- not some tiny village, but a proper town. We could definitely find supplies and information here, if the locals were friendly.



The town's buildings were clearly Palman in architecture: built by Mother Brain, not by the natives. But natives had moved in to occupy them, and they were in a state of disrepair. It looked like Mother Brain had abandoned Dezo after the humans were evacuated.

I walked up to one of the natives. "Excuse me, do you have a moment? We're looking for--"



The native obviously didn't understand a word I was saying. If we couldn't find someone who spoke our language, we were going to have problems.



Was it asking too much to hope that this weapon shop was still in operation?



It was still a weapon shop, alright: I could see the swords and guns stacked on shelves and racks behind the shopkeeper. Unfortunately, the shopkeeper himself (herself? I couldn't really tell) was as monolingual as everyone else. I guess they didn't get too many customers from outside Dezo any more.



Our sole safe haven from the cold was full of people I couldn't communicate with, and they probably didn't appreciate a stranger from another planet loitering around. What now?

After a little thought, an idea came to my mind: the magic cap let me talk to animals, and natives were sort of like animals, so maybe it'd work on them too. With nothing to lose, I put it on.



"That's... very nice for you. Do you mind if I ask a couple of questions? I'm looking for a man of Palman descent--"



If this man I was looking for existed, either the natives didn't know anything about him or they didn't want to talk. I decided to press my luck.

"Are you absolutely sure you haven't seen anyone like that?"



"Wait a minute, I can only trust that statement if I already know that you don't lie. If you do lie, then you saying that you never lie proves nothing, because I don't know if you're lying when you say that you never lie."

In response to my argument, the native rotated its head clockwise through 360 degrees. I wasn't at all sure I wanted to know what that gesture meant.



The owner of the weapon shop could understand me now as well, but his prices were ridiculous, and not in a good way.

Even though I could talk to the natives, they weren't being very helpful. Hmm. If the Magic Cap made animals nice to me and natives rude to me, and the Mogic Cap made animals rude to me, then maybe...



Knowledge flooded into my mind. While the previous hat had given me enough understanding of the natives' language to hold a conversation in it, now I really understood it. It was rich, complex and expressive, with sixteen different words for snow, twelve different words for fire, and five different words for the momentary feeling of panic when you search for an important object in your pocket and can't find it.



Zosa? That didn't sound like a Palman name. I wondered whether it was the town's original name, or a name invented for it by the natives.



The natives were just as arrogant as ever, but at least they were nicer about it now.



So they were this green and wrinkly even before the gas came and mutated everything? I shuddered to think how they could bear to perpetuate their species.



"I'm from Mota. Yes, I know nobody comes here from other planets any more. It's... a long story."


the eclipse was because the Palm people didn't pray."

Oh, great. The natives were religious fanatics.



The natives honestly believed that the gas leak had happened because the Palman settlers didn't start some big ceremonial fire on the day of the last eclipse of Algo. All my attempts to explain that gas deposits had always existed underground and sometimes a mining robot accidentally dug too far and released them were lost on their primitive minds.

I wondered what they'd say if they found out what had happened to Palm. The Palmans weren't perfect -- if they were, they wouldn't have made me into a scapegoat for Mother Brain's failures -- but they didn't deserve what happened to them.



The natives of Dezo were hunters? They killed and ate those giant apes and birds living out there? If so, they weren't kidding about being tough.

Speaking of hunting, we still needed some weapons. Maybe now that I understood the language better, I could talk the shopkeeper's prices down.



It didn't take much persuasion; he offered me everything at half his previous prices without my even needing to ask.

"Did I say something to offend you before?" I asked. "If so, I'm sorry. I didn't know your language very well."

He stretched his neck up and down vigorously. "Nothing to do with your language," he said. "You were wearing a yellow hat. Very bad for a foreigner to wear a yellow hat. Serious breach of Dezorian hat etiquette."

"Oh, okay. Thanks. While I'm here, can you tell me what it means when a native rotates his head all the way a--"

"You don't want to know."



The shop had very advanced weapons for a little town on a remote planet; apparently, all the rumours I'd heard about natives of Dezo being masters at working with Laconia were true. Kain and Hugh each bought a pair of Laconian maces, which had powerful striking surfaces and were sturdy enough to parry enemy attacks. Rudo looked over the shop's selection of guns before settling on a pulse vulcan.



The local armour shop's selection was even better. Whatever the natives were going to buy with all this money I was giving them, they could buy a lot of it. I bought some Laconian head protection for all of us, armour for Kain and Rudo, and a cape for when I was ready to go home and try to make peace with Amy and Shir -- which wasn't yet.



Although the natives were friendlier now, I couldn't extract information from any of them about the man I was looking for. It looked like they genuinely didn't know anything about him, and if that was the case they had nothing more to offer me. Hopefully there were other Dezorian settlements nearby -- but to find them, I'd have to go back through Skure. Fortunately, the town's teleport station was still operational.



The teleport station could only take us back to the spaceport; we'd have to fight our way through Skure again on our own, and there was still no shortage of things to fight down here. A rabbit lunged at Hugh, who reflexively brained it with a mace, then grimaced as he wiped the weapon clean of mutant rabbit gore.



Some of the rabbits were even more unpleasant than normal, with venomous parasites lurking in their guts. If only Nei were still alive, or Amy were here with us, we'd be able to fight them with reckless abandon; instead, I had to keep a careful eye on our stock of antidotes.



Rudo's new gun was a significant improvement over the laser cannon. It fired electric pulses that shut down the nervous system of animals and shorted out the circuitry of machines, and he could spread its fire between multiple targets.



We followed a long walkway leading up and to the west. Giant birds circling overhead spotted us through the fog and dive-bombed us without warning, forcing us to stay on our guard at all times.



The path curved to the south as it led further up, eventually leading to an adit that opened onto the southern snowfields of Dezo. There had better be another town nearby: I wasn't going to let our journey end with us all frozen to death in the middle of nowhere.