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I only knew that much about my situation because the local Titan tribe (the Urcim) saw the news about an attack taking place on a cargo ship by the Changelings. Fearing they might lose their valuable cargo, they piled their items into the escape pods and blasted them down to the planet below.
The planet where I now resided.
I suppose they intended on coming back to pick me up later and sell me on somewhere else. Who let valuable cargo like that go to waste?
I shuddered at the thought of who I would have been sold to. Much better to be taken care of by the Titans of this village. They saw my escape pod crash, and when they pried it open, they found me asleep in my cryogenic pod.
Waking up in the middle of a forest surrounded by aliens hadn’t been a barrel of laughs.
Fortunately for me, they were kind and gracious hosts. I never went hungry or thirsty. Still, I wanted to return home.
When I consulted with the tribe elders, they informed me that the only way of heading to one of the other planets was to go to the big city. The only way of getting there was by waiting for a trader to pass through. I could hitch a lift on his cart and he would take me there.
Then I could go to the palace and ask the emperor for help. He could arrange for me to return to my home planet.
I waited two weeks and still the trader hadn’t shown his face. It seemed few people came to this village.
But there was little for me to do. I wasn’t a great hunter, cook, or leader. I happened to stumble across the medical facility when a hunter was carried toward it after being impaled by a wild animal’s tusks. I explained I was a nurse back on my home planet and they welcomed me with open arms.
I was glad for the work. It would keep me busy while I waited for the trader to show up.
The village was not modern. It was a traditional tribe buried deep in the forest. It rested on a single road.
The tribe was largely forgotten by the rest of the empire, but the tribespeople did not forget. Every day, they crested a hill they called “Emperor’s Peak” that overlooked the forest and gazed admiringly at the large building perched on a hill in the far distance.
“What is it?” I said.
“The emperor,” the tribe’s chief said. “He lives there.”
He gave me a spyglass to peer through. I saw the shining majesty of the palace in all its splendor. Funny, I thought, that someone so powerful should live in the lap of luxury over there while the people here struggled to get by.
Not that they complained. They were good, kind people. Warriors who still held to the old ways. But even here, they were not untouched by technology.
They had TVs that projected holographic images. Although they often cut out due to a bad signal, and they had to fix the machines often, they were a valuable insight into the goings-on in the rest of the Titan’s vast empire.
Then came the big news.
On the holographic TV, we watched as the emperor’s palace was struck by a marauding squadron of Changeling warships.
It was like watching a science fiction movie. Except it was really happening.
The Urcim tribe were beside themselves. In their minds, the emperor was nothing short of a god. They came running outside, disbelieving what the TV was showing them, and climbed up Emperor’s Peak.
The chief didn’t need to raise his spyglass. They could watch with their own eyes the distant speck of light as the palace burst into flames. Even from there, we could hear the explosion.
A deafening thump followed by a wrenching crack.
It wasn’t only the foundations of the palace being destroyed, it was the heart and soul of the local Titans.
They dropped to their knees and wept.
Their emperor wasn’t only a leader. He was the central figure of their entire culture.
If these Changeling creatures wanted to destroy the Titans’ sense of themselves in the galaxy, there wasn’t much they could do worse than killing their emperor.
Shortly after that, bodies began to appear in the river. The Urcim pulled them ashore and checked them for signs of life. They hauled the living to the medical center where I worked and took the dead to their burial site.
The songs of mourning they sang were beautiful but solemn. They sang together, as one. The translation strip on my neck that they’d given me when I first arrived didn’t give me any hint of the song’s meaning.
