He stepped through the arched doorway of his villa and paused on the threshold, surveying the empty hearthroom, spotless of even a spec of the dust of disuse. The housemaids had kept the villa open, Bulma had told him, tending his house and her flower and herb garden, awaiting the master's return---which had been, by no means, a certainty before yesterday. The two serving women, Batha and Caddi, bowed low as his eyes fell on them. Both their pleasantly blank faces froze in apprehension as his gaze lingered on them. The master of the house never looked directly at a domestic slave, any more than he would at a mechanical appliance---unless the slave had displeased him. Both women were ivory-skinned, of middle years, their black, overly large nocturnal eyes huge as they gazed back at him in shock.

He had sent no message or signal to anyone of his impending return. The others behind him---Bulma, Scopa and the boy climbing out of her little flyer, Bardock standing at ease in the doorway, were watching him closely.

"You have kept the house and grounds in good repair," he told the women finally. "I am hungry."

Both pale women dipped again in hurried bows and scurried into the kitchens. Bulma’s dogs leapt from her flyer and bounded past Bardock into the house, circling the hearth in a mindlessly exuberant chase. He watched them silently as he sat slowly in his own hearth side chair, feeling terribly strange to be doing so, as though he were only half-waking. Both animals skidded to a halt before him as he made a clipped, commanding growl, their tongues hanging from their slobbery mouths idiotically. Bulma had trailed in after him, Romayn cradled sleepily against her breast.

"If," he told the dogs with soft menace, "either of you relieves yourself inside my house, we will dine upon roast dog this night."

They stared at him blankly for the space of a half-second, then ‘woofed’ happily and resumed their merry race around the hearth.

"Worthless beasts," he said disgustedly.

Bulma chuckled softly at his shoulder. "Yes, they are," she said. "I’ll take them back to Med Center with me in the morning. They’ll have a good time digging up the garden conservatory in the central quad."

"Leave them," he said after a moment’s thought, staring up at her. "Pack animals should not be caged, even in such a large cage as Med Center. The servants will feed them, and they may run wild through the hills as they did at Bardock’s house." The thought of cages, of caging anything with wit enough to draw breath, gave him a sense of shuddering horror he could barely mask behind the hard mold of his face. But his woman smiled, a pleased, hesitant turn of expression that stilled the internal shuddering.

She left, without comment, carrying the boy into their private rooms, the dogs loping along behind her.

"Ouji-sama," Bardock said quietly.

Vegita turned back to see the soldier seated on the circular rim of the hearth pit. Scopa had vanished into the kitchens for some reason. "There are things I did not tell you---things your lord father bade me keep from you while you were still recovering."

"Tell me now," Vegita said grimly.

"Your father has been off world for nearly ten days, but he is returning just before dawn tomorrow. In your absence, and with the loss of Articha as well, he has been obliged to lead much of the war in the field himself. You will find the Capital and Vegita-sei itself much changed, my prince. The King became far more severe in his domestic policies after you were lost…and even more so after you were found. And because of your father’s need to see to much of the war personally, he has been forced to appoint a steward from among his chief ministers to keep the homeworld in hand while he is away."

Vegita swore softly. "Mousrom."

"Your fears for Bulma’s safety were well justified, Ouji-sama," Bardock growled. "Twice I had word from sources of Scopa’s acquaintance that they were coming for her, twice I moved her and the boy just in time. On both of these occasions, your father was off world."

Vegita felt cold inside. How close had they come to taking her? And how much would the fat sadist dare even after Vegita had officially returned to the Capital?

"There is more," Bardock went on. "The entire slave population of Vegita-sei has been either rotated to ship foundries and weapons factories off world…or given to Mousrom’s hands. The only exception is Med Center, because we need them so desperately."

"Why?" His father did nothing without a reason, and rage for the loss of his heir was not sufficient to rid an entire planet of the bulk of its slave labor force.

"Since you were lost, there have been three separate attacks on Vegita-sei itself. Rad nukes smuggled onto the planet and detonated at three of the smaller port cities in the north. We contained the fallout with atmospheric scrims, but the cities were lost, and Mousrom’s own informants uncovered a forth attempt to set off a bomb in the Capital itself. In addition…there have been two assassination attempts on the King himself. It is a bad business, my prince. And the worst of it is that much of what the Inquisitor spouts in defense of his torturers’ dens is founded in truth. The enemy has a technology in their invisibility shields that allow their operatives to move among us unseen, undetected, even here on Vegita-sei. It is a monstrous weapon in the aid of terrorism. And each plot was traced to Red Network operatives here on Vegita-sei. Slaves and freedmen." Bardock paused, surveying him with a penetrating gaze. "Scopa has learned from former members of his own medical staff who have been pressed into the service of the Inquisition that Mousrom has been lobbying to have you ‘put out of your misery’ since the day you were rescued. Those Council members and Elite nobles he has not bullied or blackmailed into his hand, he has worked into a frenzy by poisoning their minds against you, my prince. He has told them that Vegita-sei’s greatest liability in its hour of need is a weak, half-mad heir to the throne."

The words hung there in the cold silence, as Vegita sat utterly still, numb to the bone with rage that could not be quantified. He was literally afraid to move or speak until it began to subside, fearing he would uproot the entire hillside beneath them if he exploded. "It is good," he snarled softly after a long time, "that I sent no word before me that I was returning. I will have the element of surprise when I greet the Royal Council tomorrow." He had not stopped to think for one moment of the last few hours just what he would be returning to. He was publicly dishonored and disgraced as a warrior and a man in the eyes of his people now. Mousrom would have somehow found out the state he had been in when he had been rescued, would have leaked whispers of it to the right ears in such a way that it could never be traced back to him. And now…the entire Empire knew. In the wake of such a smear campaign, he would have an uphill battle to win back his honor in the best of circumstances. And now he was…Vegita saw again the image of himself curled into a ball of agony, felt the gasping, drowning sense of his own lungs rebelling on him, as he remembered the thing---the thing that had happened an hour before leaving Bardock’s house. The secret only he and Bardock knew.

And beyond that considerable obstacle, there was another factor he would not be able to hide at all. He was not as he had been. And they would see it, in every word and gesture, take note of the differences within seconds after he greeted them tomorrow. One thing had not changed, he knew instinctively. He was no liar or play-actor. They were skills he simply did not possess and never would. He could be nothing other than what he was, whatever that was now. He would not even know how to begin feigning ‘normalcy’. But…he could not lose sight of the fact that no one, no one, could do a thing to him he did not allow. He would be the strongest man in the room tomorrow in Council, and---he smiled grimly---if he greeted Mousrom as he planned, in thanks for the fat man’s attempts on Bulma’s life, it would go a long way toward proving the Minister of Intelligence’s rumors as just that. Rumors.

Vegita stared into the hard eyes of the man before him. "You know I am not as I should be. Not fully recovered."

Bardock snorted. "It depends what you mean by recovery. If you are saying you are not longer that vicious, spoiled, blood-thirsty brat prince you were, and will never be again, that is not a thing to mourn."

A year ago, he would have torn the man’s heart from his chest for those words. Now, he only eyed the older soldier narrowly. "Bardock, father of Raditz," Vegita said pointedly. "Why do you advise me? Why do you not fly to Mousrom and my father and tell them the secret you know? Why would you not rejoice in my downfall and disgrace?"

Bardock’s eyes never left his. The cold, stony stare never softened. "If you were an ordinary man, I would have killed you long ago. Though you are far stronger than I am, I would have found a way. But you are not an ordinary man. The war is going very, very badly for us, my prince. Though it is treason now to say such a thing aloud. We have won many victories, but the enemy has beaten us back at every turn on a larger scale, and Jeiyce is now striking at the core systems, pushing closer and closer to Vegita-sei. We are in mortal danger of losing this war and being eradicated as a race. Unless we find a savior."

"A savior," Vegita whispered bitterly. "You saw with your own eyes today how very inadequate I am to that task at the moment!"

"You will rise to the need of your people, Ouji-sama!" Bardock said harshly. "You will find a way to overcome this impediment the Red Prince left mined in your subconscious, and you will save us all. You must. Gods of war, boy! Hasn’t it occurred to you yet how strong you must be now?!"

"Stop speaking in riddles, man!" Vegita snapped furiously.

"You lay in that torturer’s cell six months," Bardock said impatiently, like a tutor with a slow student. "What will half a year of teetering upon the threshold of death have done to a power already as great as yours?"

Vegita stared at him in utter shock. Bardock was right. Gods…the Saiyan healing factor that brought a warrior back from death’s doorway with half again his former strength. And how many times had they taken him to the edge of death with their tortures, stopped his heart or burst his organs from nothing more than the pain they were inducing, only to revive him, heal him, and start again? More times than he could count…

"The old legend of the Super Saiyan," Bardock intoned, "says that he suffered pain at the hands of Aiysa-sama of Tsiru-sei to equal the torments of the damned before he achieved his destiny. Our world’s first, violent meeting with a space-faring race---the Tsiru-jin Invasion. We thought they were demons come from the skies, because we had never seen star ships before that day. They laid Vegita-sei to waste, and took all of our kind that survived back to Tsiru-sei as slaves. Among them, the Saiyan King, Vegita. They crucified him, the tale says, in the White Hall, and tortured him before the court, while the lizards mocked him and made a sport of new ways to hurt him. Our entire race would have died beneath Tsiru-jin heels had he not saved them. I gave you those histories of Vegita-sei to read while you were convalescing, my prince, so the story might be fresh in your mind."

"It does not say how he accomplished it," Vegita said. "Only that, ‘His heart broke in grief and rage for his people, and he cast off his bonds and slew Aiysa-sama in a storm of righteous, golden fire.’ Very poetic, but not exactly a specific historical account."

"It does not tell what the last straw was," Bardock agreed. "The event that ‘broke his heart’ and pushed him over the edge. But I think…I am sure that the Tsiru-jin themselves took his raw power level to the edge of Super Saiyan unwittingly, by torturing him repetitively. Just as Jeiyce did to you."

Vegita was silent, barely breathing, as he tried to absorb the magnitude of what the man was saying---saying very convincingly. Super Saiyan…

"When you left Vegita-sei sixteen months ago," Bardock said grimly. "I hated you as much as you imagine, my prince. I still do not like you. But I think you are our hope. That you are poised to do what no one has done in a thousand years, and that you can save us all. To this end, I will follow you and aid you in all that you do, Ouji-sama. I will not see our people die and be forgotten."

"All my liegemen and vassals are slain on Avaris," Vegita told him slowly. "There is no warrior still living to whom I may safely turn my back. Will you swear to my service, Bardock?"

A flicker of something midway between fear and hope danced in the other man’s eyes, and Vegita smiled inwardly, seeing again that core of intractable honor in the man, the honor that made him as poor a liar as Vegita himself. All that the older man said or swore was the utter truth as he saw it.

Bardock nodded curtly. "That I will, Ouji-sama. And all my squad will follow suit if you will have them. Two of my band I have fought beside, shoulder to shoulder, since we were in the children’s barracks together. The others are the brats of those of our number who have died. We are all of one mind in this."

"I will not have them sight unseen," Vegita murmured. "I will meet with them first, but I will take your word on their worth. You might have slain me a hundred times in the last three months if you wanted. You have cause."

"That I do," the other man said coldly. This strong, loyal soldier of Vegita-sei would willingly swear a lifetime of faithful service to an enemy, because he saw it as best for his world. There were no apologies for deeds done, nor forgiveness either. But there was redress. And honor.

"When my position is once again secure," Vegita told him in a low formal tone. "I will have Romayn formally declared my foster son, to be raised in my own household as an Elite---foster-brother, body guard, and first lieutenant to my heir. In this way, I will mete out true payment of the blood debt I owe your house. Each day of the boy’s life."

Bardock stared at him long and hard, then swallowed, bending on one knee. "I pledge to you, Ouji-sama---my faith, my strength, my body and my life. I will serve you all my days…and thus, serve my people and Vegita-sei."

Scopa emerged from the kitchens a moment later, his face shining with a kind of eager anticipation. The Madrani drew up short, surveying the two Saiyans. "Did you---?"

Bardock nodded. "I told him everything."

"Ouji-sama…" The Madrani began slowly, unsure of whether to speak or not. "I am not a warrior, but I can be of use to you where Mousrom is concerned. He has taken members of my staff to work on his torture units…I am not Saiyan, but Vegita-sei is the only home I have ever known. I will not pretend that being a slave was anything less appealing than it was, but…You may not see it from where you sit, Ouji-sama, but he has made this world a Hell within the mortal sphere. And he is using my medics to aid him. I am in contact with a great many of my people who labor in Kharda City. They hear much of Mousrom’s private plans. They will be more than willing to pass information to you through me that might help bring about his downfall."

"I cannot kill him," Vegita ground his teeth at the words, the double meaning they bore. They tasted like bile in his throat. "Yet. He is too valuable to the Empire while we are in crisis. So, I must bring him to reign. I need leverage. Enough information to control him. Tell your folk to find out anything they can. Let them know I will grant freedom to all those who aid me in this and their kin."

"I will do as you say, Ouji-sama," the doctor said.

"If I should fall in the next few weeks," Vegita said slowly, watching both their faces tense at those words. Because of that very real possibility. And because, he realized belatedly, it was another sharp reminder of how very different he was from the man they had feared and served a year ago. How would he counterfeit normalcy under the close scrutiny of his father, who knew him better than anyone?! "If I am thrown down," he went on grimly. "Or if I fall in battle on some late day, I command you both to take Bulma and the boy, and flee Vegita-sei. Take them somewhere in the outer spiral arms, beyond the reach of the Empire." Both men murmured quiet oaths to do so. They took their leave moments later. The Madrani seemed in a great hurry for some reason, leaving without even bidding Bulma farewell.

"His lover is on Vegita-sei for a few weeks," Bulma told him around a small mouthful of food, as the serving maids piled the table high with every dish he had ever shown any remote interest in. Vegita wondered how she stayed healthy eating so little. "Scopa doesn’t get to see him very often these days. Zarbon got tapped as part of Lord Turna’s morale project when the war went into full swing. He travels to garrisons worlds, protectorates, colonies, pretty much the entire Empire, and schools the chefs there. Lord Turna told him a well-fed Saiyan is generally a happy Saiyan, so he feeds them as well as possible."

Vegita grunted in agreement around a huge mouthful of roast meat. Beside Bulma, seated on a pile of cushions so he could reach the table, Romayn was doing his Saiyan heritage proud as well, though he seemed to be getting as much on the floor as in his mouth. The dogs hovered below the boy’s chair, wolfing down each windfall eagerly.

"Would little master like some more meat pie?" One of the ivory-skinned maids asked with a poorly hidden smile.

"Uh-huh!" The boy crowed, shoving another handful in his mouth. Three helpings later, the brat began nodding, teetering atop the mound of cushions.

"I guess that’s normal for his age," Bulma said with a frustrated frown.

Vegita nodded, still shoveling the last few rounds of his meal. "We eat like that when we are growing. When we reach our full growth, we stop before we pass out. Most of the time."

"Dammit," she swore softly, hefting the boy up on one hip. "No one can seem to tell me what is and isn’t healthy for him because no one raises their own children. I try to ask Bardock things like that and he just shrugs and says, ‘It won’t kill him.’"

He followed her silently to their rooms, through their own bedchamber to the adjacent study she had converted into a second bedroom. He wondered with a vague sense of unease where she had magically produced the new furnishings in less than an hour. There was a modest sized bed under the window, and a child’s pallet bed in the antechamber that was set off from the study, separated by a swinging shutter door. "I thought we could try sleeping in here tonight, if it’s all right with you," she said softly. "It catches the southern winds after nightfall and it might be cooler." The dogs lay down on either side of the brat’s cot like drooling bodyguards. Vegita turned away from the sight of his her face as she lay the boy down. It was an expression so full of her heart, sweet and unequivocal and unconditional. He found himself in their master bedchamber again, staring down at the bed. His bed. The bed he and she had shared for more than a year before he had gone to war. Since the day he had brought her to the Capital, his falsely smiling, newly-broken, doll lover…

She yelped at the sound of the blast, rushing in to see him dousing the smoldering rubble with a gust of pressure from his Ki. The entire room was a charred mess. He turned and met her wide frightened eyes, and took her hand, drawing her back into the other room, closing the door behind him. His breath was painfully tight in his chest.

"I will not lie beside you in that bed or that room ever again," he said hoarsely, shutting his eyes against the images, hundreds of them, of her face twisted in pain and rage and grief as he used her in that room. Pain and grief and rage that he was giving her body pleasure, that she wanted this hated enemy, who broke her bones as he took her, without realizing it, or caring. It’s madness, she had said long ago, one of the first times he had commanded her to speak to truth, that you could make me come even after all the unforgivable things you’ve done to me…make me want you against my mind, against my will, against my reason. Like a fire in my blood. I think that’s the worst thing you’ve done to me…

He closed his eyes, seeing himself thanking Jeiyce meekly for a beating, thanking that smiling red face for helping him to be less evil, the booming laughter of the Aquir-jin Dodoria, the tearing pain of those razor-barbed whips---

Soft hands on either side of his face, gently pulling his shaking hands down, easing him back onto the bed by the window. She began pulling at his boots, his tunic, his pants. He gazed down at his bare chest and upper arms and---gods, what must his back look like?! He had taken no note of these things before recovering his memories, but now…He was scarred with whip stripes and other like injuries. There was probably no part of his body they had left unmarred except for his face. The scars were deep, and they were permanent. No amount of time in the regen tank would erase this.

She curled up next to him, her head resting on his shoulder, her arms around him. "Try and sleep," she said. "Tomorrow's going to be a hard day." She kissed him lightly and he stared at her, swallowing hard.

"No one did this for you," he said. She did not misunderstand him, and her body tensed against his as he had known it would. She did not say anything for a long time. "Scopa did," she finally whispered. "And Batha and Caddi, too. They were both garrison pleasure slaves when they were young women. I've had the life of a pampered princess compared to what they must have lived through."

Garrison whores...His stomach clenched, as he saw again Articha's screaming face. Another door was opening in his mind to a new chamber of nightmares. Nothing would be the same, ever again. He would see Vegita-sei through new eyes, and everywhere he turned, he would see things he had never taken note of become the stuff of horrors. That twisting sensation again, as his eyes fell on her.

"What is this I am feeling?" He hadn't realized he had spoken the words aloud until she answered softly.

"Is it like shame at having done something dishonorable, only different, more personal?" He made a noise of agreement. That was it exactly.

"It's called guilt," she spoke the alien word in her own lilting native tongue. "It's...it's a sense of a blood debt so strong it swallows you up in shame if you don't find a way to make reparation." "It is cho-gugol," Vegita whispered. "Debt of blood and honor. A warrior can only pay such a debt with his life's blood."

"Death is an easy out," she said coldly. "You big, strong warriors always talk about dying nobly to absolve your sins." She snorted indelicately. "Bullshit. It's harder, more noble, to live with the evil things you've done and try to make up for them. You're right, Vegita. You do owe me this cho-gugol. But I've told you how to be free of it."

Give me back everything you took from me, she had said.

"So you have," he said, stroking her face. He wanted her. Gods, how he wanted her. But...he closed his eyes, savoring the memory of her in his arms, her wind-tossed hair strewn with the red petals of moon blossoms, her eyes brimming with that same wealth of love that had shown on her face moments ago when she had tucked Romayn in for the night. Had that really been today? Less than six scant hours ago? Perhaps it seemed like a lifetime because he had recalled a lifetime in that small space of time---and lost her in the same instant. She was here, lying beside him. And if he began to make love to her, she would receive him eagerly. But... It would not be as it had been today. And that one, fleeting taste of how it should have always been between them had soured his desire for anything less. He could not bear the thought of touching her and seeing that look of haunted self-hate in her eyes as he held her.

"Thank you," she said softly.

"What have I done to warrant your thanks?" He asked, sinking into the sky-blue depths of her eyes. "For telling Bardock and Scopa to take Rom-kun an myself to safety if anything happens to you." "Eavesdropper," he growled, with a faint twitch of his lips.

"Yes," she said unrepentantly. "Trust your instincts about Bardock. He's sworn to you now, and I never met a more honorable man. I don't think he knows how to lie."

He frowned at her in perplexity. "I do not understand what it is between the two of you. He treats with you as though you were his own daughter. But he slew your kin, destroyed your world, killed your childhood lover---" He stopped as she began to shake all over in short ripples of laughter he realized with surprise were giggles. It made her look very young.

"Son-kun was..." She paused to catch her breath. "He was not my boyfriend. He was four years younger than me. More like my little brother." She sobered abruptly, caught up for a moment in the memory of things loved and lost. "I can't explain it, Bardock and myself. I hated him so much at one point. More than anyone I've ever known. My first year on Vegita-sei, I tried to kill him more times than I ever even thought about killing you. Every time he came to the house in Turrasht to visit, and sometimes I'd send little presents home with him as well---bombs wired into the metal of his armor and stuff like that. He seemed to think it was cute. I stopped when I realized the murder attempts were becoming a family joke. 'How will the Chikyuu girl try to off Bardock this time?' I wounded him critically a couple of times, and even then, they all thought it was hilarious. Bardock's squad lieutenant, Toma, began taking garrison bets on whether he'd come back to the barracks wounded or not, and which part of his body I'd injure, and they'd all sit around and laugh like hell when he came back bandaged and bleeding. Your people are just incomprehensible to me in some ways." She sighed irritably. "But in spite of this, or maybe because of it, he just adored me---from the first moment when we met, when I put a hole through his shoulder. He treated me as though what I had with---with Raditz was a real marriage and not just his son loving a slave he owned. Now...I don't hate him anymore. And that's good. It's like I cut some black poisonous tumor out of my heart."

"What made you stop hating him," Vegita asked intently. "After all that he had done to you." She regarded him thoughtfully. As ever, she saw through his words to the heart of his question. "The day Arbatzu fell, when he fought so hard to save as many lives as he could, only to lose the one person he loved the most at the end of the day. The way she didn't forgive him, even at the end, and the look on his face when she sent him away. The way I've seen him sit and listen to the hyper wave news feed over the last year, as the reports of more and more Saiyan worlds destroyed began to come it, and feel that helplessness of knowing your people are dying and that you aren't strong enough to save them. I thought it would feel good to see him hurt so badly. But it didn't. And now he has a second chance to do right by Son-kun." Vegita suppressed a worried chill at her emphatic assertion that Romayn was the boy Kakarott reborn.

Her eyes were veiled and fathomless blue, watching his face closely in the darkened room. "You're wondering if I still hate you. I---I don't know. Sometimes…I catch myself thinking of the you before and the you now as two separate men. Maybe because you’ve been so different since you were rescued. Or maybe for the same reason I stopped hating Bardock. Because what they did to you was---was worse in most ways than what you did to me. You never took my mind or memory of who I was away. When Scopa told me what they'd done to you, how long it had lasted, and tried to prepare me for the state you'd be in---I thought it would make me happy to see you so horribly wounded, inside and out. But it just hurt. Because I know how bad it is." He was silent, struggling with every impulse, every want and desire and need, to speak his next words. "You are free," he choked the words out. He was losing her...losing her. "I will give you a---a ship if you---"

She lay her hand over his mouth, stopping the stumbling words. "I will stay."

"You..." He knew he was staring at her open-mouthed, like an imbecile.

"Will stay," she said again. "Partly because of Rom-kun, but also because of what's going on in the Capital and on Vegita-sei now. I won't run away with my own freedom and leave all the other slaves in the Empire to that monster Mousrom. If I can do anything to help stop him, I will. And don't think he'll stop with non-Saiyan's, Vegita. He's about two seconds away from petitioning your father to allow him to interrogate Saiyans as well."

"That will not happen," Vegita said firmly.

She shook her head slowly. "Tell me that after you've been to Council tomorrow. I can help you stop him, Vegita. The same way Scopa's going to help you. And...I can help with other things too. Give me tomorrow to get some things ready and I'll show you what I mean." She went silent, lying so still beside him he thought she must have drifted off to sleep. Then, softer... "And I'll stay because of you. Because...I think you're as different from the man who went to war a year ago as if you’d died and been reborn. And because of that, I think you might become a king the likes of which Vegita-sei has never seen. A king who might hold an Empire together because it wants to be held together---not just out of brute force. I'll stay...for the hope of what you might become." It was almost the same reason Bardock had given him, spoken in different words. The hope of what he might become...to Vegita-sei and to her. He fell into sleep with that hope wrapped around him like a warm blanket.

Bardock met him at dawn, his old, but polished armor gleaming with the newly emblazoned crest of the royal house. He nodded curtly and followed Vegita as they made the short journey over the foothills to the Capital. Vegita drew up short as the older man signaled him when they reached the Palace, hovering directly over the dome of the King’s council chamber. Bardock turned to face him in the air.

"If one of the assassination attempts on the King had succeeded," he said grimly, "Mousrom would have seen you slain in less than an hour. Can you picture him on your father’s throne, Ouji-sama?"

Vegita hissed angrily, nodding his approval, letting the rage begin to build inside him. Bardock was one clever, clever bastard. He meant to whip Vegita into a murderous fury before he entered the Council, to drive him into a mental state that would be almost indistinguishable from his former self.

"It almost makes a man wonder," Bardock said. "If those attempts on your father’s life were truly the actions of the Red Network, or well concealed attempts at a royal coup."

Vegita stared at Bardock, his teeth clenched, his mind racing. Gods, even Mousrom would not dare. Or would he? The blame for each plot could be so easily laid on a few hapless slaves, all of whom would confess under Mousrom’s arts of persuasion. They would confess to having done anything if they spent enough time in the Inquisitor’s care. And there was no check nor any balance set in place to curtail the fat man’s newly granted powers. No one who had authority to question the Minister of Intelligence himself---none save Ottoussama. Vegita felt the chill of ice down his spine melt away in rising fury. He was nearly vibrating with rage now. But Bardock did not stop there.

"It is a good thing, is it not, Ouji-sama, that I received word from Scopa’s folk in time to relocate Bulma and the boy when they came for her?" Vegita nodded, a low growl rumbling inside his chest. "Can you see her in Mousrom’s hands? Can you imagine the things he would have done to her? Can you picture that fat beast laying hands on her---"

Vegita uttered a howling shriek of maddened fury and dove downward, crashing feet first through the roof of the Council Chamber. He barely heard the collective gasps of the assembled Councilors as he strode forward, wrapped in a red burn of power, tail lashing, teeth bared. He could see no one and nothing but his father’s impassive face. The others fell back before him as he came, a bit more quickly than was needful. Ottoussama did not moved or speak as Vegita stood before him. He slowly knelt down before the King’s chair, the energy of his aura crackling the wood, warping the steel.

"I am returned from the gates of Hell, Ottoussama," he growled softly. "Give me your blessing that I may serve you once again and be revenged upon my enemies."

The cold, bird-black eyes searched his face for a long, deathly still moment. Behind him, Vegita could feel the Council holding its collective breath. Then Ottoussama lifted one hard steady hand, and lay it lightly on Vegita’s head. "Welcome back," he intoned softly. "…my son."

Turna and several others broke the stillness that followed with a shout of joy. But one voice cut above the others. "We are all glad and amazed to see you recovered so quickly and completely, my prince."

Vegita was still staring into his father’s expressionless face. Now, he rose, blazing like a torch inside the aura of his own power, and turned to gaze at Mousrom’s thick-jowled, false smile---and he felt his power soar upward like a rocket. The Inquisitor seemed not to notice. He continued speaking in that same effusive, sugared tone. "We had thought you might be lost to us forever." The man never spoke a word, Vegita thought coldly, without giving it at least two shades of veiled insinuation.

"Hoped, more like," he said, too softly. Behind him, his father remained silent, letting the Inquisitor speak out of turn as though the presumptuous bastard spoke for the entire Council.

Mousrom’s piggy eyes narrowed, but he continued to smile. "Ouji-sama, you mistake me---"

Vegita whipped forward and seized him by the throat, snarling like and enraged animal. "I have never mistaken you, torturer!" He slammed the fat man down onto the Council table, still gripping his neck. "I know you have besmirched my name in Council and among the nobles, though never through your own lips. I know you have schemed to have me slain before I was completely healed of my wounds." He squeezed the doughy flesh beneath his fingers and was rewarded with a gurgle. "And I know you have attempted more than once to take what is mine and rend it to pieces out of nothing more than spite!"

"Ou-sama…" Mousrom croaked. "…boy is unstable…help!"

Turna was laughing softly somewhere nearby.

"You are a panderer of rumor and half-truth," Vegita hissed into the Inquisitor’s face. "You order a man’s name disgraced, but never face his wrath in combat. You have slain millions, but never braved the danger of battle. You plant your enormous ass in my seat at Council, on my father’s right hand, and do not expect a beating?! You are a coward, and an affront to every Saiyan warrior who ever shed blood for Vegita-sei. You are not worthy to be called Saiyan! Or to draw breath in my presence!" His fingers began to squeeze. It would take nothing to wring the life from this craven throat-slitter---but his hand froze as the big man lost consciousness with a rattling sigh. His heart was in his throat suddenly, and he was grateful, very grateful, that he had been trembling from head to toe with rage an instant before. For nor he was simply trembling with the effort to keep his face hard and immobile, to not cry out and sink to his knees under the weight of a host of memories, under a crushing wave of remembered pain. He knew he must do something, that me must speak, but his throat was so constricted he could barely breathe. "It is good," said a woman's voice at his shoulder, "that our Prince has learned to better master his temper, Ou-sama. A year ago, he would not have considered our need for such...necessities as Mousrom over the pleasure of pulling off his head." A rusty feminine chuckle. "Though I confess, I am disappointed that he did not."

Vegita stood slowly and tossed Mousrom's slack form against the nearest wall. He turned to meet the dark, dancing eyes of Articha. "I will call him out in single combat when the war is over," he told her through gritted teeth, trying to master the shudders still coursing through his body. "That will be and entertaining five seconds," she said.

One corner of her mouth was quirked up, the nearest she ever came to a smile. There were no questions that were seemly to ask or answer as one warrior to another. It occurred to him that she was pleased, honestly pleased to see him come back to himself. He heard her voice in the haunted depths of memory, calling to him, telling him to be strong, speaking gently when he finally crashed into the abyss of madness, as gently as Bulma soothing Romayn. And she looked...fine. Though he knew it was not so, knew the scars they had cut into her mind and body ran as deep and permanent as his own. But none of this could be said. And it would be unthinkable even to offer thanks, because of the memory of disgrace and humiliation it would raise.

She is a very strong woman, Bulma had said.

"It is good to see you, General," he said in a formal tone. Because there was nothing else that could be spoken aloud.

She stood straight and tall, her arms folded on her chest. "And you, my prince." "Dine at my house tomorrow night, you and your mate," he told her. She would be able to tell him all that Bardock had not been privy to, and all his father might withhold from him until he had truly proven himself again.

"You honor my house, Ouji-sama."

"Out!" His father commanded abruptly. "All of you. And take that---" he gestured at Mousrom. "---with you. I will speak to my son alone."

Vegita stood motionless until he and his father were alone. The King stood and approached him, cold, black eyes boring into his, trying to read the soul inside. "How is it with you, boy? The truth." "I am well," Vegita said slowly. "But...I am not as I was." That was purest truth, at least. "That I can see," his father muttered. "What did you do, boy? Have someone drive you into a rage before you arrived?"

Vegita kept his face from flushing into a deep scarlet with a great deal of effort. "It worked," Ottousama grunted. "On all of them, except perhaps Articha. She has told me some of what was done to you both, perhaps things you have no clear memory of yourself. Can you go into battle as you are now?"

Vegita was silent. Here it was…and now that the moment had come, he found that the lie he had intended stuck in his throat. I cannot…the lie would endanger the whole of the Empire. And when I meet Jeiyce in the field again…gods, how can I know how many triggers he left mined in my subconscious? He might turn me upon my own soldiers with a word! He met his father’s hard stare, saw that there was gray at the older man’s temple’s that had not been there a year ago, saw the dark shadows of utter exhaustion playing around his eyes. Saw that he did not need to answer the question.

"I would not have returned until I was sure that I am not a liability to you and to the Empire, Ottousama. But I have listened to the hyper wave broadcasts for weeks now, and I knew that there is no time left." He set his jaw and sank to one knee before his father’s chair a second time. "Do with your servant as you judge best, Ou-sama. I will bow to the needs of Vegita-sei."

"You are less of a liability now than you were two years past, boy," Ottousama said with a gruff chuckle. His cold eyes were sparkling with pleasure. Vegita regarded him in open confusion. "You think before you speak," his father said. "Consider before you act. Check the full force of your rage when necessity demands it. And you put the good of the Empire over your own interests. The rest will come in time. When you are ready to lead this war again, I will send you out to face your enemy a third and final time. Until then, there is much to do on Vegita-sei, as you have relieved Mousrom of his stewardship in single combat…"

How? Vegita wanted to ask. How had things come to such a pass that Mousrom had come so perilously close to tipping the scales of power in his favor? But he knew. The Inquisitor had made himself so indispensable in the absence of a royal heir, taking advantage of the King’s need for a strong right arm, taking more and more liberties as his position became more and more rooted in utter necessity. Playing power games when the survival of the Empire was at stake. And Ottousama had given way to the man…choosing solidarity over his own security upon the throne. For his world. For his people. The King stood slowly, and did something he had seldom done unless ceremony demanded. He lay one hand on Vegita’s shoulder. His grip was warm and firm.

"What you have endured will give you strength, boy. It will cool your youthful rages to cold cleverness in the heat of the moment. You have in you the makings of a king out of legend, though you still have much to learn. Bring Mousrom to heel here on Vegita-sei, and I will look to winning the war until you are ready for the field. Resilience is the greatest strength of our race, my son. And the old saying holds true. What does not kill a Saiyan…" Ottousama grinned wolfishly. "…will soon have great cause to regret not having done so!"

He took his leave of his father and strode through the dark, sepulchrous halls of the palace, so lost in his own thoughts he barely took any note of the hushed murmurs and whispers that followed him.

Disgraced...dishonored...And powerless to kill the one who had made the full extent of his---his injuries public knowledge. He made his way past the throngs of court officials, of petitioners, of barons and lords of the realm and simple guardsmen, not speaking or responding to any who were bold enough to address him, his temper growing more frayed with each step. Whisperers and stone casters! They had no concept or measure of the word pain, of the word torment. It was easy for a fool to judge what he did not understand...and feel a bit higher in his own little place in the scope of things by looking down upon the fall of the mighty. He was snarling with rage by the time he had reached the Great Round, the hub of the palace's spider's web of administrative offices. The more prudent fell back before him as he came. Those who stood and stared he tossed out of his way with an angry swipe. It soothed his ire in a direct, temporary fashion, but it would make no difference really. Wherever he went, all eyes would fall upon him...and most would turn away after a moment in agitated shame. He had been their leader, their general, their strong god of war. He was the Saiyan no Ouji. And he was their pride, the measure by which all warriors were judged. And his---his defeat and his captivity had wounded their sense of themselves, crushed their morale badly enough. The rumors of his broken madness were eating his people alive with a very personal sense of having been---been raped as a people. Of knowing their best, their strongest, their most favored son, had crawled on his belly at the enemies feet. He stopped, still fuming, but considering now. He knew he must take a measure of how deep the obstruction in his mind ran. He knew he must begin to push at the edges of the barrier the Red Prince had erected in his mind. But there was a more immediate matter he must attend to first, a matter that lay hand in hand with exploring the full extent of his new power, the unimaginable strength he must have gained...He set off in the direction of his own personal training domes, wondering what use his father had found for them in his absence. Nothing could have prepared him for what he found. The largest high gravity structure was a stinging fly's nest of very young warriors, all of them Elites of noble birth judging by the markings on their armor. "Get your tail around your waist, Cabaj, or I'll cut it off for you! Don't---!" The giant who was barking out commands and threats to the pack of adolescents scrimmaging above him had an air of confidence Vegita had never imagined possible in the man. The big warrior glanced down as Vegita stepped beside him casually and went pale with abject shock. In the metal rafters of the dome, the boys had halted as well, staring. Rikkuum frowned up at them and bellowed like a space port alarm.

"I didn't tell you little bastards to stop fighting! Get back to your bout or I'll gut the lot of you and feed your carcasses to the sea shrikes!" The young soldiers went hurriedly back to their battle. Rikkuum turned back to Vegita, a tentative, almost unbelieving smile poised on his lips. "Ouji-sama," he said slowly. "They told me you were wounded so badly you might not survive. Are you all better now?" There was no guile or mockery in those words, nor in the earnest expression on the big man's face.

"I am well," Vegita said curtly. "And ready to train. I have not fought in...in a very long time. I must prepare myself to destroy my enemies."

"I am to train with you again?" The great lummox looked like a child gazing upon his fondest dream when Vegita nodded. Rikkuum snapped his head up and shouted at the boys in the air. "Everyone out! We will train tomorrow if Vegita-ouji's schedule allows." He grinned down at Vegita as the youngsters zipped out, nearly bursting to run and tell the entire city that the Prince was alive and whole, preparing to fight again. "I am happy you are alive, Ouji-sama!" Rikkuum said as he began stripping off the weighted plates he wore in the high gravity bubble, and donning his old Tsiru-jin blast shield armor, the armor that had kept him alive in many of his bouts with Vegita.

"You father made me a teacher for some of the stronger cubs on Vegita-sei, but...a warrior pines for a challenge, an opponent stronger than himself, to test his limits and increase his strength." His grin turned ferocious. "I was feeling my life was over when you found me, Ouji-sama. I have not had a worthy, strong master since Lord Frieza-sama died. A true soldier lives to serve a master stronger than himself!"

Vegita stared into the giant warrior's open, fatuous expression of faithful devotion and hid a grin when it occurred to him that the look on his face resembled nothing so much as Bulma's dogs, trotting adoringly at his heels. A flicker of movement caught his eye and he saw Rikkuum's training class peering in through the shield view ports on the dome, jostling and shoving each other for a position in front of the glass. There were several older faces pressed against the high, overhead windows. Word of his return was spreading.

If they wanted a show, he would give them one. An exhibition to remind them forcibly of his strength would go a long way toward quashing Mousrom's slanders, that had left many in the Capital whispering that Vegita was hidden away, a mad, raving wreck, never to recover...He hissed through his teeth as the rage boiled up inside him again. These were hearsay, unfounded rumors the Inquisitor had seeded here and there, that grew with each retelling. None of which bore any hard facts. To have given out an exact account of his injuries and mental state would have been to betray himself. Vegita must give his people concrete tales of things witnessed with their own eyes. And when the evidence of things seen conflicted with fifth hand tell-tales, they would put aside the accounts of his broken madness as slanderous untruth, swearing each to the other that they had never put any stock in such foul liable. It would not erase his disgrace at having been defeated and taken alive, or restore their faith in his leadership. But it would douse the bulk of the added fuel Mousrom had thrown on the fire of public opinion, and give lie to the worst of what his people believed.

"Rikkuum."

"Vegita-sama?"

"It is a good day. The air is warm and the sky is clear. I do not wish to fight indoors." He marched out of the dome with Rikkuum behind him, trailed now by a growing throng of others as they passed through and out of the interior training grounds. The big man kept pace with him as he rose slowly into the air above the Palace. Half a dozen figures ascended to meet them, sweeping upward in an arrowhead formation. Bardock and the other warriors behind him halted. An eager smirk was lighting his scarred face, giving it an almost boyish air.

"My prince," he said with a grin. "Could you use a few more sparring partners?" Vegita bared his teeth with an answering smile. "All of you and Rikkuum at once! Now!" They leapt at him as one, Rikkuum’s greater strength and speed granting him the honor of being the first Vegita pummeled. He began increasing his power by slow increments, flaring steadily upward as they darted in and out, circling him like pack predators. His Ki---his Ki was rising like a missile, filling him with a wild, fierce joy that sang inside every fiber of his body. He threw them down, sending them crashing into the blade spires of the Royal Palace, slamming through roofs and walls of the city below them. He caught fleeting glimpses of upturned heads on the ground, of ever-growing crowds of people watching, open-mouthed. And his power soared higher still, threatening to spin out of control as though he’d caught a hurricane in one hand as it lashed in from the Western Sea...and still there was more he had not called upon, could not yet summon because he lacked the control to hold it in check. It was that enormous.

They burned the crystalline blue of the morning sky to red with their auras. He was shining like a newborn sun, he realized. They fought on. And as time passed in a glorious, quick step blur, as the morning gave way to midday, others began to join in as Bardock's squad members grew too injured to move. And gods, he was still holding back to keep from killing them. Vegita sensed, deep inside the well of his power, the he had only tapped the surface of what he was now capable of summoning. That ten fold this near god-like power lay just out of his reach, just beyond some intangible barrier in his mind and heart. If he could grasp it...he would be a god indeed. Nothing would be beyond him.

By the time the shadows began to lengthen toward evening, he had seen a dozen complete rotations of fresh Elites, groups he was vaguely aware that Bardock was changing out at the top of each hour. None of the higher-powered nobles had blinked at Bardock's command in ordering Vegita's opposing sparring squads. They were too eager to try their hands and feel in their own battered bones just how strong their prince had grown.

Vegita left the central beaurocratic offices and large sections of the palace itself in need of serious repair by the time they broke for the day at dusk. He had very deliberately hurled his opponents into and through the main offices of Central Intelligence most often, but the entire Capital took a beating as the day wore on.

He was rusty and imprecise, the wages of a full year of physical idleness. But the power...again, he was struck by the mental picture of himself holding the tail of a cyclone that might tear himself and everyone around him to pieces if it slipped free of his grasp. He would need to train like a madman to simply control this new power.

Incredibly, Bardock and Rikkuum were still standing at the end of the day. Vegita did not have so much as a nick or a bruise. No one had even come close to tagging him. He left the Capital humming like a live wire with talk as he departed.

"Next time," Bardock said painfully as he limped behind Vegita into his hillside home's hearthroom, "I will mark you, my Prince."

"It is good for a soldier to have goals," Vegita told him. "Unrealistic though they be."

"Edeeta 'n Poppa!" A high voice called from beneath roughly two hundred pounds of dog. Bardock frowned irritably, perhaps because Bulma had taught the boy to call him by such a foolish nickname as 'Poppa.' Or perhaps because Romayn had greeted 'Poppa' second. Vegita lifted the boy from beneath his slobbery attackers and sat him on his feet, while Bardock eased his bruised, bleeding body onto the hearthrim. The older man snickered at his son's damp appearance. The animals had licked the brat until he was soaked from head to toe. Vegita knelt and frowned down at the boy, watching in fascination as the child drew his own eyebrows together in a deliberate, perfect imitation of Vegita's expression.

"You enemies have overborne you, boy." He turned Romayn back to face the dogs. "When you are out-numbered, you must move faster. Understand?"

Romayn nodded eagerly, still glowering, looking like a furious miniature of Bardock. The boy waded back into the fray. He whipped around the dogs, darting in and out like one of the flower-sipping insects in Bulma's garden. Bardock stood up, his half-grin slipping off his scarred face, to be replaced with wide-eyed amazement. Then Vegita saw it too. The boy was streaking around the yipping animals, circling and rushing in to yank a tail before darting back again...and his feet were not touching the floor.

"He's not even eighteen months old," Bardock said softly.

"I did not fly until I was well past three years," Vegita muttered.

"Gotcha!" Romayn bawled. He caught Yaro in a headlock and began aggressively licking the hapless beast's head.

Vegita sat down slowly, more unnerved than he would care to admit. Had anyone ever measured the boy on a scouter? No...of course not. Romayn had never seen the inside of the infant conditioning units, never been through any sort of official evaluation. Vegita frowned internally. When he had been a boy, less than ten years old certainly, a child had been born with a birth power level of...had it been ten thousand? Something that monstrously high. His father had commanded both the brat and all his kin put down, and their bodies tossed into Vegita-sei's sun. Because of the threat such a child presented to the throne. The King of Vegita-sei ruled by the old laws, the rule of the fittest, the strongest. And if the King was no longer the strongest, if any warrior felt he was sufficient to the task, he had every right to challenge the King for his throne. If the boy was indeed some sort of prodigy, Ottousama would---He shook off such foolish concerns. The boy was an uncommonly strong child of strong parents. And perhaps…perhaps the unconventional mode of his rearing was creating anomalies in his development.

"Should he be speaking at this age?" Vegita wondered aloud, sitting back in his hearthside chair. His muscles were pleasantly sore, burning with the good, familiar sting of over-taxation. Bardock shrugged in answer to his question.

"The child development texts in the incu-ward say no." Bulma was carefully skirting the child/dog melee as she carried a tankard of goldberry wine, followed by two whirring, vaguely anthropomorphic machines. The contraptions were bearing a mountain of food in their six arms. They began to set the table matter-of-factly, then they whizzed back into the kitchens for more food. Vegita noticed Bardock was eyeing the things warily as well. "Not in whole sentences anyway," she went on, pouring both men a cup of the warm, amber wine. "I think it’s just inherent Saiyan preciousness and an uncommon amount of early mental stimulation that---what?" Bulma put her hands on both hips, frowning at their uneasy expressions. "Have neither of you seen a servo-bot before?"

"Momma made ‘em," Romayn said.

"They can do everything a humanoid slave can do, and they don’t need to sleep or eat. And they tend to make fewer mistakes. Try them this one time. If they still give you the creeps, we can have Batha and Caddi, or someone else replace them." She scooped the boy up under one arm. "Are you hungry, Rom-kun? Or did you fill up on dog hair?"

"I’m hungry!" He cried, wiggling to be set on his feet again. She sat him down with a sad little sigh. The boy’s days letting her tote him everywhere were past forever. She regarded both men with raised eyebrows. "How about you two? Did demolishing half the city work up an appetite?"

Vegita forgot about the serving machines and dug in, nodding absent, full-mouthed permission for Bardock to join them at table. They ate like slaves shoveling admantium ore for over an hour before Vegita was sated enough to turn his mind to anything else. "You made these…things?"

She rose and pulled Romayn off his perch atop one of the bots in question. The boy had been riding it back and forth as it cleared plated and added new ones from the kitchens, eating as he went. "They’re my father’s design. My people didn’t believe in slavery, so we built our servants. I told you I would have a surprise for you tonight, Vegita. Stop." The servo-bot halted instantly, and she leaned down and touched a latch shielded button on its side. It erupted in a burst of metal resin smoke, and vanished. Bulma raise a thumb-sized pellet from the floor and laid it in Vegita’s hand.

"I cracked the Maiyosh-jin miniaturization technology secret," she said simply. "Mousrom’s techs were going down the wrong theoretical path. I’ve diagrammed the entire construction schematics."

Vegita and Bardock stared at her.

"There’s more," she went on. She lay another pellet on the dining table and sprang its catch with practiced ease. A holo-projection of a solar system spun lazily around inside a---Vegita frowned. The bluish force field encircling the small star and its satellites was not a hologragh. "Bardock," she said, stepping back, behind Vegita. "Try and blast it."

Bardock raised a hand slowly and released a small ball of energy at the glowing orb. It struck the pale, bluish light around the miniature and rebounded. Bardock quickly hurled a quelling rush of Ki to keep the ricochet from tearing a hole in one of the walls.

"Boom," said Romayn softly.

"It’s a shield that will screen out even the capsulized plasma nukes Jeiyce and his friends are so fond of," Bulma said softly. "Nothing short of a planet’s sun going nova will pierce it, and it can expand to cover a world or an entire solar system."

Bardock was shaking his head in stunned amazement. "I wondered what the hell you were doing day and night last winter. Why you threw that fit when we had to abandon your work and relocate a second time. But---but gods, girl!"

"You---" Vegita was trying to process the magnitude of this achievement. "Woman, you---" He knew he was sputtering like an imbecile, but he could not seem to get a full question past his lips. It had taken her less than a year, working alone, to work out the miniaturization science that every master engineer in the Empire had failed to crack. And that did not even address this shield she had wrought…

"We had a technology very, very similar on Chikyuu," she told him. "I started out with pieces of the puzzle no on else knew. But the safety shield…" Her eyes glowed. "That’s all my own. I’m pretty proud of how well it turned out." She held Romayn a little tighter, her eyes darkening. "It will save lives. No more Saiyan colony worlds nuked from orbit in their sleep by invisible attackers, the soldiers and the---the children alike."

"This will need to be tested on a grander scale, but---" He shook his head, feeling dazed. "Woman…this will give us the breathing room we need from their cloaked sneak attacks!"

An hour later, Vegita stood beside his father, Turna and Articha---the only two members of the Council still in no way under Mousrom’s sway---as they crowded around the little villa’s dining table to watch Bulma demonstrate her ‘capsules’ and the shield a second time. Vegita had summoned them all to his own home rather than transport the devices to another location and be seen by unfriendly eyes. Ottoussama was silent for a long time, turning over each and every implication of such a defensive technology in his mind. Slowly his mouth curled into a grin. Then he burst unexpectedly into a loud, hearty chuckle.

"I have seldom been so glad as I am at this moment to have spared someone’s life, girl!" He sobered after a moment, and studied Bulma’s lovely face and humbly downcast eyes shrewdly. "Though I think you are too dangerous to run loose in my Empire," he said cryptically.

"We can set the factories in the east to construct these shields in mass quantities as soon as the integrity and durability of the technology is tested on a grand scale by the royal college of engineers, Ou-sama!" Turna told him eagerly.

The King grunted. "The girl will have to sit down and explain it to the fools first."

"I will make the necessary arrangements, Ou-sama, and we can…"

His father and the grizzled, smaller man were striding outside, the King issuing a steady stream of commands, Turna already on his hyper wave link, calling a team of techs to come and take charge of the prototype and Bulma’s design files. Vegita watched them go. He knew his father would expect him to be at his shoulder, but something was niggling at his mind, a shadow of an idea. He moved down the darkened hall to the room Bulma had converted at some point into a small medical library, and began searching furiously through the shelves of books and discs for what he sought. He found it after a moment, a copy of one of the same medical journals Scopa had brought to Bardock’s house, and flipped through the text for something he remembered having---he found it!

Back in the hearthroom, he found Bulma and Articha deep in conversation. He did not stop to wonder what two such dissimilar women could find to talk about so intently.

"Bulma!" He thrust the medical treatise at her. "Can you build this, with a few modifications? As an added feature of your shield?"

She stared at the specs for the rad plasma stabilizer invented by the physician scholars of Zapria-sei to permanently convert the lethal weapon’s heavier elements into a lower energy solidity that might be fed to Kobal-jin amphibians as a treatment to impede the growth of cancerous viroids.

"It could be designed," Bulma said slowly. "To be part of the shield system. And it’ll turn the hot components of the nukes to rock when the missiles strike its field." She glanced up at him with a small smile. "Yes. I can build it."

A bit later that night, Vegita found his father and Turna hammering out the last details of the quickest possible manufacturing scheme for Bulma’s surprises should the tech’s report prove favorable in the morning. The addition of the rad plasma stabilizer to the shield sent Turna into another furious set of recalculations.

The black of full night was giving over to blue when they concluded the last of the details of production. "If it is what it seems to be, I will set every other production facility aside for its manufacture," his father said. "This is your project, boy. Appropriate any and all resources of the Empire you need to get it done. We must have these shields in place before the moon arrives in the fall." His father stopped with a sharp eye before he left. Behind them, Turna was still hunched over the Council table, scribbling furiously.

"Bardock has taken Nappa’s place as your lieutenant?" Ottousama asked quizzically.

"Yes," Vegita said slowly, unsure of where this was leading.

"And you have taken his son to foster?"

"It is a more fitting payment of blood debt than any amount of wealth, Ottousama," Vegita told him.

"Your bed slave designs counter weapons in her spare time, struts through your house with her head high as though she were its mistress, and the pair of you guard your affections in company less well than Turna and Articha when they were first bound under the moon." His father snorted. "And, worst of all, you brought that pair of useless, yipping beasts back to the Capital."

Vegita’s chest tightened. His father was right. He had…forgotten himself in his urgency to let the King and his chief councilors see Bulma’s new machines. He had forgotten how the world expected him to behave. But…it would have been ‘normal’ for him to have joined Ottousama and Turna after Bulma’s initial test in his house. It would have been ‘normal’ to have given no pause and no thought to the medical treatise he had read more than a month ago and how it might be used to destroy plasma nukes inside their missiles. There was no defiance in his words, no trace of it in his voice, but he stood his ground, and shook his head firmly.

"I am different, Ottousama. They will see it soon or late. But I cannot go back, only forward. Nor would I wish to. If…" He paused, trying to sort out how best to speak his thoughts. "If they had not taken me craftily on Avaris, I would have soon fallen through my own folly. Because I lived and breathed inside my rage at not having all the galaxy ordered as I wished each instant of my life. Because I never once stopped to think before I acted or considered any course of action other than brute force. Before I went to war, had the throne fallen to me by some mischance, I would have led Vegita-sei to her doom by now."

"I know all these things, boy," his father snapped. "But you must have a care how you are perceived. You have only been back one day. Tonight, your people are in a joyous uproar over your return, over the strength you so cleverly displayed all this day. But Mousrom’s next ploy will be to discredit the stability of your mind, and the smallest twitch in an unfamiliar direction will be seen as proof of his lies. Articha and Turna are to be trusted, but you must guard your every waking move in other company. And as to your private life…" Ottousama glowered at him in the dimmed light of the darkened Council Chamber. "This---" His face twisted in distaste. "This ‘family’ you allowed to form around yourself during you illness will be noted. It will be seen as weakness and softness of mind on your part."

"I will guard myself more closely," Vegita said curtly.

"Anything a ruler or a crown prince dotes upon openly is a danger to him, boy," his father said balefully. "And may be used to control him. If the thing he dotes upon is not already controlling him herself."

"I am governed by no one and nothing," Vegita snarled softly, "but necessity and my own honor." He took a deep breath, willing the anger rising up inside him to still itself, willing the cold words poised in his lips to be silent. "Have you not always told me it is just to reward faithful service? She drew me back to myself, Ottousama. But for her, I might have remained ‘that gentle boy’ with no past forever. At least until you were forced to put me down."

"I do not discredit what she has done for you," his father said. "Or these counter weapons she has devised. She is not mine, but for such a great service to the Empire, I would set her free."

"I have done so already," Vegita murmured.

"And still she stays…" Ottousama’s face hardened with displeasure and something like worry. "Then set her aside and take another concubine." It was not a suggestion. Vegita did not answer for a long, tense moment.

"Not," he said at last, with cold finality, "For all the wealth in the Empire, my father."

Ottousama regarded him another moment in glowering, almost tangible tension. Then he uttered a soft growl of a sigh. He shook his head and spoke the next words like a chill foreboding of the grave. "As you wish. But mark me, boy. No good will come if it. And I fear you will weep blood before the end of it. Before you look your last on her, she will make you wish you never drew breath."

By the time he returned to the villa it was less than an hour til dawn. He passed Bulma’s workroom, heard a metallic clang and soft conversation, followed by the sound of women’s laughter. Articha’s voice drifted in through the closed door.

"…trained all three of my sons in my own household before they went to the children’s barracks at four. He is a very early bloomer, but they say his father is uncommonly intelligent."

"I’ve been so worried they’ll think he’s…defective in some way," Bulma said softly.

"You have not gentled the boy as greatly as you fear. He has a strong will to fight."

So, she had found someone to answer all her questions about Romayn, Vegita mused. It was odd though that Articha should take even a passing interest in a royal concubine, a former slave, no less. But then, perhaps the general was…different now. As different as Vegita himself, after the sentence in Hell they had each endured. But…his stomach clenched in shame as he heard her voice calling to him, telling his to be strong, to remember who he was. Offering him the surplus of her own strength, regardless of what had been done to her. Articha had never lost herself. Never broken. Perhaps this odd affinity between the two women was like calling to like. The fact that they were both ‘unbreakables’.

He sensed a flicker of Bardock’s muted Ki in the library and pushed open the door to see the older man pouring over a thick ledger volume. Romayn was lying on his back on the cho-deer skin in the center of the room, a sleeping canine on either side.

"I had an idea, Ouji-sama." Bardock held up one of the high pile of volumes, all bearing the crest of Maiyosh House, and handed it to Vegita.

"I brought these from the great library at Med Center. It is a financial history of Maiyosh-sei. A paper trail of all worlds that have ever been owned by Maiyosh House. I’ve found three already that are not on any standardized star charts."

"Edeeta’s my friend," Romayn said from the floor with a drowsing smile.

"Go to sleep, boy," Bardock said absently.

"You are thinking," Vegita said, studying the accounts of worlds bought from the Tsiru-jin planet trade or colonized by Maiyosh force of arms, "that one of these worlds might be Je---" he ground his teeth, and began again a few seconds later. "---might be his main base?"

"It would have to be a world his people knew intimately," Bardock nodded. "You cannot simply find an uncharted system and set up base sight unseen. That is suicide."

"Yaro’s my friend," Romayn murmured.

"I am in auspicious company," Vegita said with a faint smirk.

"With your leave, Ouji-sama," Bardock said. "I would like to search the whole of Maiyosh House’s records archived in the Royal Library for something that might give them away. It will take a bit of time, but it may yield great results."

"Do so," Vegita said firmly.

"Poppa’s my friend," Romayn said.

"I will only be your friend if you go to sleep," said Bardock with a glowering frown that looked as though it was hiding a grin.

"…you said so…" The boy said around a huge yawn.

Bardock gestured to the pile of large books on the study. "I can review everything here first and feed the relevant information into a computer to cross-reference everything a self-sufficient military base would need with each world’s resources."

Vegita smiled grimly. It was a search strategy no one had thought of as yet, and there was a great deal of logical merit to it.

"…said we’d be friends next time…" The boy on the floor sighed softly.

Bardock froze in mid-gesture, his mouth poised to frame words. He turned very slowly and stared at his son, a strange, almost frightened expression dancing across his scarred features. "When did I say that, Romayn?" He asked softly.

The boy issued another bone-cracking yawn, his eyes closed, one arm draped over Baka. "Before…when I was a big boy." He was asleep.

Vegita frowned curiously as Bardock’s face drained of all color. The older man sat down unsteadily in the chair behind him. "She could not have told him…"

"Bulma?" Vegita asked, eyeing the man’s blanched pallor. He looked like a man who’d just seen his world unceremoniously inverted.

"She was not there when I killed him," Bardock whispered. "We found Kakarott easily when we landed on Chikyuu. He was training under the apprenticeship of a native warrior. A strong old fellow. My son attacked me when I killed his sensei, and the other boy fled to seek help. Gods, he was a strong brat…But he’d failed his infant purge mission, and his---his wits were addled as well. Some injury he sustained on planetfall, probably." Bardock took a deep breath. "In any case, the law is clear on the fate of a child who fails an infant purge. I---I told him I was his father. I pointed at my tail as proof…and he stood down and dropped his guard. He said he could not forgive me for slaying the old man. I told him perhaps we would be friends in his next life. And I put a hole through his heart."

Vegita felt an icy chill shoot down his spine. "No one else was present?"

"No one. I told my squad to stay well back while I did what I knew I must do. God of gods…" he said softly. "I thought the girl was mad the way she keeps insisting the boy is---" He broke off, and shook his head as though trying to get a firmer grasp on a new ripple in his reality. "While you were at war, Bulma told me that Chikyuu’s guardian demi-god spoke to her when my crew began the purge. He told her his god bade him give her a message. A prophesy. He told her that Kakarott’s soul would return to her soon, because one day, the lives of every living thing in the galaxy would rest upon his shoulders. He told her she was to guide the boy to his destiny, but that she must walk a long, dark road first…And that she would fail her charge if she let herself give in to hate."

Vegita gazed down at the sleeping boy. "You are speaking of things out of legend," Vegita said with false certainty.

"Rebirth is everyday magic, Ouji-sama," Bardock muttered. "All men accept it as fact. And it is said that those the gods choose of their instruments are sometimes reborn with the memories of their past lives intact."

Vegita was silent, wondering how much he owed to the Chikyuu-jin god’s admonition to his woman that she not give way to hate. He wanted to bark some harsh reprimand to the man for such a fool’s fancy. He would have like to shrug it off as another sign of his woman’s superstitious bent. But…

Before…when I was a big boy…No child of sixteen months would say such an unnerving---

"It does not matter," Vegita said finally. "Believe he is some divinely graced savior of all life if you wish. We must look to the enemy at hand."

"You are right, Ouji-sama," Bardock agreed quietly, falling back into his comfortable pragmatism with relief.

There was too much to do in the days that followed, too many shortages of supplies, too many problems that seemed to have no answer until late into the night, too many decisions in the simple day to day administration of the Empire piled atop the production of the shields. After only a week of this, he began to develop a new respect for his father that bordered on awe. And in the midst of all this, he must also find time to beat and tear his muscles, his reflexes, and his stamina back into peak fighting efficiency. Three weeks and the royal engineers had replicated a small rad shield based on Bulma’s specs, and were ready to test a planetary scale prototype on the second moon of fifth planet in Vegita-sei’s own solar system. Six carriers, loaded down with hastily manufactured plasma nukes, launched enough missiles to turn Vegita-sei’s frigid sister world to dust. The shield held without a hitch. In the secondary test, Bulma’s suggestion to the elite engineering core, who would have cheerfully burned her at the stake out of nothing more than green-eyed jealousy, a series of bombs were taken through the initial net around the planetoid, in simulation of a nuke smuggled onto Vegita-sei under the enemy’s invisibility cloaking technology. The two terrorist bombings in the south had been accomplished with bombs brought to Vegita-sei on Saiyan ships.

The second test went off as flawlessly as the first. The plasma stabilizer field built into Bulma’s shield turned the nukes into canisters of harmless coal dust rock. Vegita commandeered a dozen plants in the eastern seaboard region and began to work through the plans to refit them for mass production each night, with Turna and Bulma adding organizational and technical amendments to his original ideas.

All this while, his father led the war. All this while, his father fought in combat, leading the fleets and forces of the Empire in a foundering attempt to buy Vegita the time he needed to raise a buffer of safety. It was not long before the whispers began, before eyes began to look at him in askance, in silent apprehension, as it became more and more apparent with each passing day that Vegita had no intention of returning to the field. As speculation, fueled by Mousrom’s rumor mill, as to why this was so began to earn him apprehensive glances everywhere he went. But there was no help for it at the moment, and in any case, the shields were all that mattered. Once they were in place, the entire Empire would see why this secret project had been set before every other manufacturing effort on Vegita-sei. And why their Prince had thrown all his might into it instead of a head on battle with an invisible enemy.

Each night, he sat in Bulma’s garden, working to overcome the…the obstacle that prevented him from going into battle. Each morning, he sat on his father’s right hand in Council, or led the meetings himself if the King was off world, marking Mousrom’s ominous submissiveness. Bardock’s report on previously Maiyosh-owned worlds, all meeting the criteria of a potential base, gleaned from more than a month of eye-straining research on the scarred soldier’s part, sent Turna into a fit of self-deprecating morose that the royal bean counter had not thought of such a thing first.

On the night before the first and largest of the shield production plants was to go on line, Vegita sat frowning over the security plans for the factory---a factory which could not under any circumstances be left open to sabotage. He frowned down at the scattered specs strewn across the dining table. If there was a hole in the security strategy, he could not see it---but that did not mean it was not there.

"It is done, my prince," Turna told him, scribbling hastily on his hand comp, pulling up stats on potential sights to ground the shield generators on the nearest of Vegita-sei’s colony worlds. "The plants are as secure as they can be. We must turn our minds now to securing the finished product when we distribute the generators among the colonies."

Yaro and Baka, lazing beneath the table, suddenly raised their heads in unison. They growled, haunches arched, hair bristling. It was a sound he had never heard either animal make in earnest, though they snarled and nipped in play with Romayn every day. Vegita had left the garden doorway open, to let the cool, damp breeze that held a promise of rain later that night sweep in and take the heat humid summer heat with it.

Vegita scanned the projected completion dates. Three weeks until the first planetary scale shield would roll off the line, ready to be erected on Vegita-sei. Another month before the first shipment of the carrier-sized devices could be encapsulated and transported to the colonies. Too much time. There had to be a way to cut the production time even more. Perhaps…perhaps Bulma’s little army of servo-bots could be juiced up to increase speed on the assembly line.

"Woman!" He bellowed. He had not seen her since they had all taken a hasty meal together just after nightfall, and it was nearly midnight now. Below the table, the dogs continued to rumble and whine.

"The strikes on Skirat, Pikach, Maytu, and a dozen other worlds were accomplished without the benefit of miniaturized nukes," Turna was saying. "The tech slaves, or rather, the Red Network operatives masquerading as loyal tech slaves, sabotaged the shields and sensor nets on those worlds."

Bulma emerged from her workshop, a smudge of something black on one side of her nose, her mussed hair bound up above her head in a top knot. The same black grease on her face was covering the front of the engine mechanic’s overalls she was wearing. She looked hot, tired, irritable…and utterly beautiful. He felt a foolish smirk begin to slide across his face, which only seemed to annoy her more.

"How may I serve you, Ouji-sama?" She asked waspishly. His smirk widened.

"The plants use a full compliment of your servo mechanoids for production," he told her, after explaining what was needed. "The facilities are guarded by Saiyan warriors with above average technical expertise. The planet based hubs of the shields will need heavy guard as well. What we need is better security and faster production."

"Two things," she said crisply. "I can go around to each of the plants and tweak the bots one at a time, for higher speed. It’ll burn their processors out quickly, but we’ll only need them for a few months anyway. Also…I can add another layer of security by personally inspecting the shields, every one of them, before they go on the transports. I could also---"

Yaro bared his teeth and snarled hatefully, as the thing both animals had sensed made itself known. Mousrom lumbered slowly into the arch of the door, and bowed low. How long, Vegita wondered coldly, had the bastard been lurking by the door, listening? Turna echoed his own thoughts, in his quiet, gravelly voice, an instant later.

"If you ever breed these animals, Ouji-sama, I would gladly have one for my own household," he murmured. "An animal that can scent an enemy’s presence quicker than we can is a valuable creature."

"My humblest apologies for disturbing you at such a late hour, my Prince," the Inquisitor said. "But there is an urgent matter that needs addressing." His oily gaze swept the others, lingering on Bulma for an instant too long, crawling over her body in an assessing manner that made Vegita snarl like one of the dogs beneath the table.

"Mousrom," he said softly. "If you so much as glance in my woman’s direction again, I will gut you where you stand."

The big man’s eyes glinted with quickly hidden fear laced with malice. But he lowered his eyes obediently.

"Tell me your errand!" Vegita snapped. He did not invite the man past his threshold, so Mousrom merely stood there, fingering a stack of documents in his hand.

"I have a list of names of suspected enemies of the Empire, all of whom have been put to question, Ouji-sama." Mousrom smiled like a kindly old tutor, watching Vegita’s face avidly. "Vipers in my own bosom, in fact. They are all former medics from Med Center whom I took to aid in…extending the life expectancy of the more valuable suspects under my attentions." Bulma had made a soft little choking noise. Vegita snatched the list from his hands.

Less than two months. It had taken Mousrom less than that to find all of Scopa’s contacts, medics whose knowledge in the service of healing had been perverted under the Inquisitor’s command. Medics who had sworn their service to Vegita, though they had yet to give him any useful information of the fat man’s movements and designs. Mousrom would have spotted such rank ammeters in no time.

"I have the name of the man to whom they report, their cell leader," Mousrom went on. "But he is a free employee of Med Center, and thus, under your personal protection. In fact, I believe he was at one time a slave in your own household. In any case, I need your permission to take him."

Scopa…

Vegita eyed him coldly and said the last thing Mousrom could have expected. The truth. "They were not Red Network. Scopa’s folk were monitoring your actions at my command. I must be sure of all my servants, Minister."

Mousrom blinked at his in abject surprise. "Surely you do not doubt my loyalty to Vegita-sei," the fat man said, almost incredulously.

Vegita wondered which had thrown the Inquisitor off more---being spied on, or his own blunt, flat honesty. It must be something the man seldom encountered. "You always swear your loyalty to Vegita-sei," he said. "But never to the throne."

The Intelligence Minister’s face went beet red with fury.

"A prince has the luxury of trusting no one, Mousrom," Vegita went on coldly. "You will return my servants to me…if they are still alive."

"They live," Mousrom’s lips twitched. "After a fashion. Though I fear they may never be quite right again. The broken never are. But…you know that, do you not, Ouji-sama?"

The Inquisitor was hurled into the stone tiles of the threshold, indenting a circular section with his body, before Vegita even realized he had struck him. He knelt, gripping the man’s collar and shaking him like a rag doll. "You must take as much pleasure in receiving pain as in inflicting it to constantly tax me so, Mousrom!"

"I spoke the plainest truth!" Mousrom spat through a mouthful of loose teeth. "I shall do it again. You were a thoughtless, spoiled young fool before the Red Prince took you into his care. A danger and a liability to the throne and the Empire. Now, you are a weak, mentally-unstable, soft---"

Vegita roared an enraged oath and drew back his hand to ram it through the fat man’s heart---and collapsed with a shriek as the pain rose up and swallowed him inside memory, the images of a hundred, a thousand recollected torments, all set to the song of Jeiyce of Maiyosh’s soft, mocking laughter.

"My Prince!" Turna was trying to turn his spasming body over.

"He’s not breathing!" Bulma was saying .

He could not breathe, could not draw in even a tiny gasp of air.

"I thought as much," Mousrom’s voice bore an odd mix of poorly veiled admiration and clinical detachment. "Subliminal mines!" A short bark of malicious laughter. "He cannot kill. Gods, what a devilishly cruel and clever thing to do to a Saiyan warrior! You will have to knock him out, my girl. I imagine he’ll asphyxiate if you don’t."

A single solid blow fell and he knew nothing more.

He woke to a soft hand caressing his forehead. Bulma’s face faded in, and she only stared at him, her expression an artful mask that would have done a Saiyan proud.

"Close the door behind you, girl," his father said shortly. Bulma rose and left quietly. Vegita sat slowly, staring up into his father’s hard, angry face, feeling more shame than he would have thought possible. It clenched inside him like a dose of deadly poison.

"I do not need to tell you that you should have told me," Ottousama said.

"I did not know how deep the geas ran until tonight." Vegita set his teeth. "I learned as I was preparing to return to the Capital that there was a…block around the act of killing in my mind." He closed his eyes, remembering how the simple act of swatting a summer insect off his arm, of willing the thing dead and following through on the act, had sent him into a seizure of gasping, debilitating pain. Only Bardock had been present to see it, and the attack had been over in minutes. Since his return, he had wrestled each evening with the compulsion in Bulma’s flower garden, trying to kill the garden slugs that had begun to feast upon her plants and drink from the rich soil as the weather grew hotter, the rain less frequent. The reaction was stronger, perhaps because the slugs were larger, more intelligent, but little by little, the fits were becoming less violent, as he killed the things in practice each night. Bardock had suggested that, judging by the severity of the attacks from killing such lowly creatures, it would be very dangerous to experiment with killing a sentient being until he had…worked his way up the food chain, so to speak.

"I knew that when I set my will to kill any living thing, it would come upon me as---as though I were in their hands once more. Since I returned, I have made progress in…breaching the block. Though obviously, I have a great way to go." He met his father’s eyes. "I would have waited until I was completely healed, Ottousama. But…there was no more time left to me. I was needed. Even as I am now, I am needed."

His father was silent. "By tomorrow," he said finally, in a voice like the bass toll of death bells. "The entire Capital will know. No one will follow you, or even heed your words now, boy. And I---" The King grated out the words as though his mouth were full of razors, as though the act of speaking his next sentence sliced his jaw open to the bone. "I must give you place in Council to your enemy…and discard you as an unfit successor to my throne."

"Father…" Vegita choked, before he could stop himself from speaking.

"There is no time left, as you say," the King went on mechanically. "The moon is coming in three months time. Vegita-sei will be at her most vulnerable and ripe for an assault. We must be united, and your presence at my side would cause dissent." His father studied him with an eye that saw through all his pretensions of normalcy. That saw though everything, and had from the beginning. "I have no doubt that any attempts to slay you will be painfully unsuccessful, though not lethal, to the challengers who will seek your life after tonight. I will not see your dispossession be a permanent thing. I will help you as much as I may to set yourself to rights, my son, and take your rightful place, once again. I will not let the Red Prince take my son from me. He shall not have that victory!"

He lay staring up at the ceiling after his father departed. There was no grief, no pain, no shame. No rage. He could not seem to feel anything at all. He was utterly numb. The quiet click of the door latch, and Bulma reentered the room. She sat beside him, not speaking, only staring at him for the longest time, her blue eyes like bottomless wells of still sadness. Had her eyes always held that deep, almost immeasurable sink of mourning? He had never once noticed it until he woke to the sight of her face at Bardock’s house. The first beautiful memory impressed upon the blank slate of his memory after Avaris.

"You cannot be grieving for me," he whispered.

"I’m not," she said. "You aren’t dead."

"No," he replied dully. "I am worse than dead."

"No," she snapped. "You are feeling sorry for yourself."

He frowned up at her, stunned. There was no anger at her for those hard biting words, where before, he would have been hard put to reign in his rage, hard put to keep from killing her. And though this was not a bad thing, it was another glaring statement of how much of him they had changed, muted…broken. He had no words of reply to her cold response, though he could not have been more taken aback by them if she had suddenly gained fighting power and beat him senseless.

"You don’t realize it," she went on, less angrily. "But you love your world and your people more than you’ll ever love me or your father. You started to realize that on the day Arbatsu fell, and since you came back, you’ve used every means at your disposal---not just your fighting strength--- to save them. Even if your people are fickle, bone-headed fools who can’t see that there’s more to being a ruler than brute strength and killing, do you want to see Vegita-sei fall? Do you want to see your people wiped out and this beautiful world burned?"

"No!" He said harshly. "I do not want that! I will not allow it!"

"The do your duty by them as their Prince and get up tomorrow as though nothing were wrong," she said. "Keep working on the rad shield project, keep training with Rikkuum and Bardock’s people, keep looking for Jeiyce’s base, and keep trying to break the conditioning triggers he left in your head. Scopa and I have treated hundreds of Mousrom’s victims, people he released after he broke them and found they knew nothing. I can tell you where to start." She thrust a deactivated vidpic into his hand. "It’s Jeiyce of Maiyosh’s image, taken at his wedding on Corsaris eight years ago. It’s the only picture I could find of him. The prime factor in breaking through any wall of conditioning is to shatter the personal control of the one who did this to you. We can start slow. By looking at his picture. Ready?"

He nodded grimly. She switched on the vidpic…and he uttered a soft sob, his insides churning with sickened shame, as he turned away from that smiling face, his limbs and spine contracting into a defensive ball. "Try again," she said softly. He growled defiantly, and forced himself to turn back, forced himself to look. His hands flexed on the device, smashing it to bits, as he gasped for air as though he had just fought a battle to the limit of his strength.

"Ten seconds," Bulma said gently, lifting his head into her lap, stroking his sweat-covered face. "That’s a very good start. And squashing his picture is an even better sign. Say his name."

He did not speak, his throat constricting at the mere though. "Bulma…" He rasped faintly.

"Say his name," she said again. "Don’t let him keep that power over you. Take it back, Vegita. Who is your enemy?"

"Jeiyce!" He spat the word out. "Jeiyce of Maiyosh! The Red Prince! The---" He broke off, staring at her in amazement. Not once since they had carried his limp body from that black, sunless cell had he spoken the man’s name without stumbling over the word, without some deep, integral part of him quailing. She leaned down and kissed him, slow and deep, one hand slipping around his waist to gently stroke his tail until he reached up with a low growl and pulled her down, drawing his mouth down the bare line of her throat. "What was that for?" He asked breathlessly.

"Positive reinforcement," she said with a tiny, wicked smile. "You have to do this as often as you can. Look at him, say his name again and again. And keep trying to kill the leaf slugs in my garden."

"You knew," he whispered.

"I knew," she replied softly. "One step at a time, Vegita." Her hand tightened on his tail and her sly smile widened marginally as he growled again.

It had been agony…agony….lying beside her each night, holding her, and not…not… "Bulma…" He husked against her collarbone, his mouth seeking lower to the swell of her breasts, nuzzling the hardened nipple through her blouse. "Gods, I want you…"

Her own breath was becoming labored. He could hear her heart pounding inside the frail cage of her chest, feel her body’s heat rising in pace with his desire.

"I’m right here," she gasped. Her eyes were closed, her body pressed against his was trembling with want. He could feel, smell, the heat of her desire for him. He raised his head to brush her mouth with his, meeting her eyes---and all the fire raging inside him died in a heartbeat at the sight of the haunted swirl of desperate desire and self-loathing blazing there. He drew back from her, leaving her gasping with unfulfilled need and incomprehension.

"Don’t…please don’t stop," she almost sobbed.

"I cannot," he said unsteadily. "In Bardock’s house, I told you that I had looked in your eyes and seen that you wanted me, but that wanting gave you grief." He reached up and stroked her beautiful porcelain face. "I cannot hold you with that look in your eyes…even if it means never having you again." He drew her back into his arms as silent tears began to course down her face. She lay her head against his chest, her whole body quivering.

"I keep thinking it wasn't supposed to be this way," she whispered. "We were supposed to meet another way, begin another way. And everything just got twisted...and now---now, it's all ruined." He wrenched his mind away from the stark, unrelenting truth he felt in those words, and pushed her hair back from her eyes, peering into her face.

"Why do you stay, Bulma? Why do you help me? I listened to you speak of what you believe, the things you think are right, when we were at Bardock's house. I hung on your every word. I know you. Why are you not working with the Red Network to destroy the Empire?" "Because of the things the Maiyosh-jin rebels have done since the war began," she said without hesitation. "Jeiyce started out on a righteous mission in my opinion. And Vegita-sei created the 'Red Prince' the day they purged Corsaris." Her eyes were distant, looking back to a past littered with countless ghosts. "Raditz led that purge, you know," she said softly. "I--I loved him. I did. But he killed all those poor people, Jeiyce's wife and baby included. And he couldn't figure out why I went cold toward him afterwards." She shook her head wonderingly. "I couldn't even think about what he'd done after---after he died. It's taken me more than three years to stop idealizing him and see him as he was, the good and the bad. But Jeiyce..." Her eyes snapped back to his, cold and clear. "He was the good guy. He was the hero fighting the uphill odds against the evil Empire."

"Woman..." Vegita said, soft and warning, feeling something that bordered on the old half-remembered rage brewing inside his chest to hear her speak of---of that man in such a way. "I said was," she went on. "What he's done with the nuke attacks, the way he's made war, has destroyed any good he could ever have achieved. The wholesale slaughter of colonies and garrison worlds, slave worlds and planets loyal to the Empire, the way he's killed the Saiyan warriors along with the civilian populations of those worlds, what he did to you and Articha...and more than all those things, that attack on Auberj-sei colony, where he and his men took out all the warriors hiding inside their invisibility shields, then---then pulled all the babies out of the colony's miniature incu-ward and had a party butchering them." Her eyes had gone flat with hate. "For all that your people have done, all the children they have murdered, they've never tortured or toyed with them. A Saiyan warrior's honor forbids giving non-combatants anything other than a quick death! Jeiyce's hands are filthy with innocent blood, and the worst thing about him is that he knows better. He wasn't raised to think people of other races aren't really people. He wasn't taught that fighting and killing are the best entertainment this side of heaven. Corsaris was a parliamentary monarchy, and his foster father raised him to respect life and freedom and---and now, he's worse than what he believes your father to be, because nothing, no rule of honor or morality, no horror of atrocity, is beyond him." She seemed out of breath from the force of the fury he saw surging behind her eyes. "As bad as I think the Empire is, the galaxy-wide chaos and in-fighting that would follow Vegita-sei's fall would kill more people than this war has. The men who began the rebellion have lost their way. They've become the thing they hated, without the stay of Saiyan honor to stop them from becoming monsters as lawless and ruthless as Bardock's histories depicted the Tsiru-jin Empire. And you...You've changed as much as Jeiyce since this war began. If Jeiyce and his men have become evil, you're becoming..."

"Good?" He prodded with a half-smirk.

"No," she said. "Not yet...but you're heading there." She kissed him. "Vegita-sei's been my home for eight years now. It's like you. Beautiful and horrible in its great goods and great evils. I love it as much as I hate it...so, I'll fight to save it."

To his shame, he had to fight a constant battle to not succumb to fresh bouts of self-pity in the weeks that followed. He could do nothing to silence the mutterings and silent contempt that dogged his footsteps wherever he went, but he put a violent, abrupt end to open mockery instantly. The first day after his expulsion from his father's counsels and favor, he beat three Elites to a hammered pulp for outright insolence. As when he trained, if his intent was not to kill, he was more than capable of vanquishing any enemy. It gave all those who might think of challenging him to a death match pause. It made the wrenching loss of his father's company and faith easier to bear. He worked, he trained, he poured over Corsarian ledgers, Tsiuru-jin accounts, Maiyosh histories and records, looking for something the search of Maiyosh finances had not yielded. Each potential base from Bardock's initial search had yielded empty, long-abandoned colony settlements, or nothing at all. He shuttled Bulma from plant to plant, recalibrating each of the servo machines for the greatest potential speed, heedless of how this looked to anyone, driven by the inexorable approach of the red light in the sky, the ever-waxing moon nearing Vegita-sei in its decade-long elliptical orbit, bringing with it a dangerous loss of thought and reason. As his father had said, Vegita-sei would soon be ripe for attack.

He took guards for the manufacturing plants of Bardock and Turna's choosing, soldiers who would follow Bardock, Turna or Articha's commands, though they would turn their faces away in shame whenever Vegita was near. The mere fact that he still lived, that he had not chosen to end his life, maimed and dishonored as he was, gave most soldiers a twisting sense of personal disgrace. To see the public ideal of Saiyan pride and strength cast down, reduced to nothing more than an orchestrator for the production of defensive mechanical weapons, too cowardly in their eyes to even die, was a crippling blow to their morale. He bore it all, the stares and the shunning alike, though there were days when his gut was knotted in frustration and rage that he could not even eat. He rested little and slept less, counting off the tic of days until Moontime, as his body grew stronger, his reflexes and strength rising higher each day in step with the soaring, titanic swell of his Ki. It was...gods, he had never imagined he cold grow so strong. And still, he could not kill. He sat in Bulma's garden each night before sleep, killing the leaf slugs his woman worked so diligently to keep from her flowers, spoke the name of his enemy, blasted his vidpic and holo-pic a thousand times. But each foray into slug slaying left him weak and gasping for breath, fighting to keep his windpipe from contracting.

"I stomp 'em," Romayn told him conversationally one evening, as the boy rooted in the soil with a tiny spade a few feet from where Vegita sat, planting what appeared to be a dead dryweed beside one of Bulma's rose bushes.

"Do not track their guts inside," Vegita muttered irritably. Even a brat of less than two years could kill these squelching things...and he could not. He raised his hand, a dot of power beading on the tip of one finger, pointing at a hand-sized invertebrate that was diligently making its way toward the stone bed of deep purple pansies. He released it, searing the slug to ashes, doubling over on the bench beneath him, nearly sobbing with relief when the spell passed, and he could breathe again.

"Edeeta?"
"You," Vegita sat up straight again, willing his body to relax, willing the shaking to stop. He eyed the boy almost accusingly. "You speak all the words in your vocabulary without impediment. Except my name. Ou-ji-sa-ma." He took another deep, steadying breath. "Try that."

"Ou-dee-tah-ma."

Vegita considered thoughtfully. "I think I prefer 'Edeeta.' You have until the end of the summer to say it correctly. Then I will feed you to the dogs."

Something that sounded suspiciously like a giggle came from the boy's direction. "I wanna go boom too."

He gazed at Romayn narrowly, pondering the sort of question Bardock had avoided like a contagion in the last weeks. "Do you not remember how?" From 'before...when you were a big boy? He thought, with a flicker of superstitious unease.

"I forgot," Romayn said. "The Ojjiisan said it's bad for babies. I'm a baby."

The 'Ojjiisan', whoever or whatever He was, had been wise to take the knowledge of how to harness Ki away from the hands of a newborn, Vegita mused. He could feel his curiosity to know more of what the child remembered of his last life and of---of being dead beginning to whither under the boy's matter-of-fact gaze. Whatever he asked, he sensed, the boy would very probably answer to the best of his ability. His mind instinctively wanted to veer away from the sense of philosophical vertigo that looking things in the eye which should be hidden from the living awoke in him. I will ask...I will. When he is older...

"Do you wish to learn?" He asked after a moment's thought.

"Yes!" The boy leapt up and bounded over to where he sat.

"It is much the same as when you fly," Vegita began.

"Can't fly," Romayn said sadly.

"You hover over the ground and propel yourself where you will. Flying is the same thing, only higher."

"Oh."

"The same energy you use when you fly is the energy a soldier uses when he fires a Ki blast. You---" He had taken the boy's small hands and framed them in a cupping pose before his chest. Something was hauntingly familiar here, though it felt inverted. He latched onto the memory a moment later.

"Push the energy into the space between your hands," Vegita repeated the words softly. The small face scrunched up in furious effort, and slowly, a tiny dot of incandescent power began to form.

Vegita suppressed an apprehensive frown. It had taken him several attempts over several long, strenuous hours, to do this the first time, and Romayn had just---just done it. Savior of the universe... "Now that you have it in your hands," Vegita said. "It is yours to command. Throw it." He glanced down to see a slug making its slow, plodding way across the courtyard. It had almost reached one of the rose bushes. "Our enemy has almost reached his goal. Stop him!" It was a good throw. The leaf slug burst apart into burning bits as the minuscule volley struck it---as did the rose bush beside it.

"Oh no," Romayn said in mild horror.

"Great goddess," said a soft voice behind them. Vegita had been so intent in the lesson, he had not heard Scopa's flyer set down on the grassy flats behind the garden. "Did Rom-kun do that?" "Momma'll be mad," the boy said mournfully, staring at the ashen bits of pink petals settling around them. As though he had conjured her by her name, Bulma emerged from the house and uttered a soft gasp as her eyes fell on the murdered bush.

"My aim was off a bit," Vegita told her unrepentantly when she looked at him questioningly. "Do not glare at me, woman. The root is salvageable."

She eyed them both suspiciously for a second, then turned and stomped back into the house with only a, "Bedtime, Rom-kun!" as a reply. She had not even noticed the doctor's presence. "You fibbed to Momma," Romayn said. The boy seemed caught somewhere between horror and admiration.

"Go to bed, boy," Vegita told him sternly. He nearly jumped when two small arms wrapped themselves around his leg, tightening for half a second, before the boy darted inside. A warrior and a prince does not embrace anyone other than his mate, and only in private, Ouji-sama... Nappa's gruff voice chastising him for just such a gesture toward his sensei when he was younger even than Romayn.

"I wonder which is stronger in your people," Scopa said, voicing Vegita's own thoughts. "Nature or nurture."

"I would not use that boy as an indicative test case," Vegita said shortly. "What is your errand, Doctor?" "Mousrom has gained your father's leave," Scopa said bleakly, "to set up a specialized inquisition unit in Med Center for his own personal use in questioning high level Red Network operatives." Vegita was silent, his face a cold mask that veiled the sickened fury churning inside. "How did you come by this knowledge, doctor?"

"Mousrom's clean sweep of all my informants in Kharda City was not as clean as he thinks," Scopa said quietly. "And my friends have made it clear to me that even should they suffer the same fate as the others, it is better than the daily torture of aiding Mousrom's Inquisition. And even if they die, they know their families will be freed, Ouji-sama. Many people would gladly give up their lives to see their children grow up free."

"When does he plan to begin?" Vegita growled.

"At dawn tomorrow."

Vegita smiled grimly. "Clear your folk from the entryways. I will greet him when he arrives." "Thank you, Ouji-sama." The Madrani seemed on the point of rethinking his next words, then thrust a holo-disc into Vegita's hands decisively. "I developed this for you, my prince. It is a hardlight holographic sparring program. It will integrate with the projection software in the high gravity domes. I designed the sim opponent to look like Jeiyce of Maiyosh." He watched Vegita's perfectly inexpressive face nervously. When Vegita made no comment, he bowed briefly and turned to leave.

"I will not forget your good service to me, Doctor," Vegita said.

The Madrani smiled, and bowed again. It was an easy, boyish expression of an utterly clear conscience. The effortless smile of a good man. Vegita watched him leave in silence. He remembered sleeping easily each night, being very happy with his life and all things in his world. But it had not been a clear conscience so much as the absence thereof. No regret, no true honor or sense of duty that conflicted with his own desires. No burden of cho-gugol each time he touched his woman as they lay together at night in a chaste embrace. No depth of feeling for anyone or anything. Three years ago, he had been a vicious, spoiled boy-child, even though he had been a man in years. Worthless to his people an his world, Mousrom had said. A political liability to his father. And...it had not been true happiness or peace of mind he had felt. It had been thoughtlessness. He did not wish it back, or the white hot, blinding rages that had been more than kissing cousins to the tantrums he had thrown as a babe. That ever-present child's fury at being balked in any way had followed him to war. It had burned through what should have been clear cold judgment and cost him the lives of tens of thousands of faithful soldiers. He could not go back, he had told Ottousama. Only forward, wherever that led.

He met Mousrom at dawn as the Inquisitor set down on the main cargo landing pad before Med Center, a host of hundred or more warriors at his shoulder. Behind him, tech slaves were landing three large supply ships, the gusts of hot exhaust from their engines heating up the already warm morning air.

"I told you long ago, fat man," Vegita ground out. "Med Center is not a torturer's hovel." "If my actions displease you, boy," Mousrom replied, watching Vegita's face tense at the lack of any honorific, a malicious reminder of his loss of rank. "You are more than welcome to kill us all." The soldiers behind the Inquisitor erupted in nervous snickers. A hundred men as his guard. As though that would protect Mousrom from him. Vegita smiled.

"I do not need to kill you to stop you, Torturer," Vegita said coldly, watching Mousrom's smug expression give way to consternation as Vegita failed to rise to the bait. That was the fat man's intent, of course. To whip Vegita into a fury, to manipulate him into trying to kill the Inquisitor. An action that would end in Vegita's collapse.

"I have heard men speak of the beauty of the whore you stole from Raditz, boy," Mousrom went on, his beady eyes full of calculating malice. "She is indeed a sweet piece of---" Vegita blasted forward, his mind focused and cold. He began to tear through the soldiers surrounding Mousrom as though they were paper targets, stunning and breaking bones with surgical efficiency. As he beat each soldier down, he deliberately hurled him in the general direction of the Capital's center. It was over in less than five minutes.

"Out! NOW!" Vegita roared at the techs and flight crews of the transport ships. They scampered away from their vehicles in terror, and Vegita calmly blew each ship to scrap metal. Then he turned back to Mousrom who stood quivering like a frightened pudding as Vegita advanced on him.

"I will not kill you, Mousrom," Vegita said with a nasty grin. "But I am going to hurt you very, very badly."

He took his time, breaking the bones of he man's extremities first with slow, methodic cruelty. By the time Vegita reached to man's spine and pelvis bones, the Lord Inquisitor had begun to whimper and sob, sounds the man must have heard countless times, though never from his own lips. When Mousrom finally lapsed into unconsciousness, Vegita hurled him toward the city as he had the others. He had expected to feel a great deal of pleasure as he beat the man. For some reason, he only felt nauseous. He cursed softly and leapt into the sky. The first round of rad shields were two days from completion, three weeks from shipment. Far too perilously close to Moontime. He had no more time to waste fighting his own kind.

Turna and Articha petitioned the throne officially for leave to distribute the shields among the colonies personally. No one opposed them. No one dared after the tale of Mousrom and his hundred warriors circulated. As the first of the shields neared completion, Vegita turned his mind to erecting shield upon Vegita-sei itself. The actual activation was a simple matter, especially with Bulma’s growing army of bots and Bardock’s folk to aid them. The logistics of space traffic control, security and guarding the generator during Moontime was another thing. The shield ‘windows’ that Bulma had configured to be authenticated with the specific Ki signature of officers on each ship in the fleet still needed shepherding, a living being to run traffic control. Bardock took instruction from Bulma, and in turn, took over the tutelage of a selected number of warriors in the service of Articha’s barony. They were unenthusiastic, to say the least. Therein lay the problem. Any warrior who sat in the shield operations post, allowing Saiyan ships in and out of the protective net around Vegita-sei through the authentication windows would consider it a punishment. It was a job for a lowly Madrani tech slave, not a Saiyan soldier. It was also a job that could not be trusted to anyone other than a Saiyan.

"That’s it," Bulma said softly, as they lay together the night after the shield went online at last, their stomachs pleasantly over-loaded by the celebration feast her servant bots had prepared. He had not even thought to question the wisdom or propriety of having Bardock’s folk and Scopa to table. It had not occurred to him in the state of euphoric relief he was bathed in that night that having commoners and freedmen sup at his hearth was an outrageous allowance. It was odd how this fellowship of unlikely allies had broken down barriers of class, even in his own mind. He had watched in mild disbelief as Bardock and the Madrani doctor began to sing tipsily, some alien tenor descant Vegita did not know. Let the ‘party’ tonight bring more talk or not, Vegita thought with a mental shrug. He could not be more disgraced than he already was. And let the moon come. There would be no attack during this season of the moon, and no more colonies lost to bombing strikes. Turna and Articha would leave with carrier full of the shield to distribute them among all Saiyan worlds at dawn tomorrow. But there was still much to do.

"There are still the smaller shields to be fitted on the carriers," he said.

"Yes," she agreed. "But that’s it for the war. You’ll eventually find Jeiyce and his Red Demons, but…for everybody else, that’s it. Vegita-sei can’t see or detect the rebel worlds in hiding because of their invisibility technology, and they can’t touch you now because of the shields. Stalemate. No one else has to die."

He was silent, thinking of the mass purges that would follow in the wake of a Saiyan victory, the eradication of every world that had so much as smiled on the Maiyosh-jin, of every race with even one son or daughter fighting for the rebels. She was right about the rebel supporters at least.

He did not need to tell her he would have ordered it done. It was simple pragmatism, to prevent enemies from rising again at some later date. But Vegita-sei could not destroy what it could not find. And there was no loss of face in this scenario.

"It is not over until Jeiyce is slain," he murmured against the soft perfume of her hair. "We have a little less than nine weeks until Moontime. I would rest easier if he were run to ground before then."

"This will be my first Moon," she said. "Have you ever heard how Articha and Turna got together?"

"Only that they are bonded by the moon," he said. It was uncommon enough to take note of, but he had never been told the particulars. Every Saiyan who remained on the homeworld for the coming of the moon would be given a cerebral neuro-trank to prevent the high level of empathic openness moon madness triggered in their kind. And thus, as all the females went into moonstruck heat, they and the strongest men who won their attentions for the night would only couple inside the rage of moon madness. But they would not bond.

"Have you ever been with a woman under the moon?" She asked curiously.

He smirked. "I always preferred to fight. This will be my first moon as a man grown. I was only seventeen last time. Tell me Turna and Articha’s tale."

She smiled. "He is back country nobility, and only moderately high powered. She was super Elite of heir to an ancient, powerful barony. But she told me they wanted each other from the first moment they met. The problem was, if he initiated a courtship spar, her honor would have demanded that she couldn’t throw the fight. And she’s about twice as strong as him, and would have just pounded him flat. So, they refused their neuro-suppresants at moontime and they went to the bad lands in the north where no one lives---and bonded under the full moon." She sighed so dreamily, he chuckled.

"It is not the sweet encounter you imagine," he said. "Moonbonding is very, very violent. The two ‘lovers’ nearly tear each other to pieces as they couple."

"But Articha said it’s as though he were inside her mind and soul," Bulma went on. "The other half of her heart."

Vegita snorted. "And if one of them is slain, the other will pine and die within a day---if the shock of the loss itself does not stop their heart. It is not ‘romantic’ to draw your partner down into death with you. If I should die, I want you to live long and happily, woman! Not die with me as Turna would have died had Articha been killed by the Maiyosh-jin."

A small wondering smile touched her lips, though she did not reply.

He rose that morning and flew north and east to begin over-seeing refitting the largest of the factories for the construction of shield adapters for the fleet for the first half of the day.

"Terrorism is a real threat," Bardock muttered grimly, as they stood in the air watching the ships come and go through the authentication windows over the Capital. They circled in a wide wheel around the city, hovering above the main shield generator that lay bunkered beyond the western rim of the Capital where the spaceport looked out upon the Western Sea a few miles outside the gates.

Vegita nodded, frowning in frustration. The shields were flawless as they were, but could be sabotaged as easily as any other mechanism. "It will need Saiyan hands to guard it constantly, and Saiyan hands to man it. We have enough people trained at this point to alternate the duty in shifts, so no warriors are saddled with the responsibility indefinitely. We have two main worries at this point." Vegita glanced up at the red sphere in the sky, already tinting the blue of Vegita-sei’s skies to violet with its approach. "Even after all our worlds and ships are equipped with new shields, the ships may still be high jacked by rebels with invisibility shields. They may still arrive on Vegita-sei bearing a load of invisible stowaways. And the guards we set upon the generator cannot kill what they cannot see."

"Bulma’s has built guards bots designed to detect movement and minute changes in air temperature, and to open fire on warm pockets," Bardock said. "No one knows this because no one has seen the shield bunker but our own. Terrorists will not be prepared for it, and even it they anticipate such a security measure, even an invisible man will stir the air around him when he moves."

"A squad of invisible warriors could do much damage," Vegita said. "Even if they cannot get directly at the shield. As for Moontime…Turna has kept my father abreast of all we have done. He has commanded that the shield windows be deactivated during full moon. No one will be allowed in or out for the three nights of full moon. We will key a lockout combination sequence known to only you, myself and my father. But that does not solve the problem of who will guard the generator when we are all out of our wits. The bots will not suffice."

They landed and toured the generator itself, pondering its strengths and weaknesses. "Scopa was telling me something last night," Bardock said. "About how he is dreading the madhouse Med Center will become soon when we cloister all the very young brats and alien women below in incu-ward. The cubs will be sedated so the low-powered medics can maintain some semblance of order. Incu-ward, Scopa said, is bunkered below ground, but in addition, it is shielded from the moon wit lunar reflectors. They are a simple construct, merely the inverse of a moon bauble. Bulma and I can fit the generator bunker with the same sort of reflectors, so the guards inside will not be affected at moonrise."

A burst of agitated Ki rippled the air to the east as they rose up again over the spaceport. The figure of a small girl was speeding toward them. Vegita recognized her as Bardock’s youngest squad sister, Anyan.

"Ouji-sama! Bardock-san! We’ve found him!!"

Bardock leveled an indulgent grin at the small soldier. "Who have you found, brat? The Red Prince himself?"

"Yes!" The girl gasped out. She stared at the openly smirking faces of both men and opened her mouth to curse them both like lazing dock hands, before she remembered one of them was royalty. "We were baby-sitting the bots at factory 3 when Toussan received an encoded hyper light transmission from Lord Turna about the war in the colonies---The Red Demons struck Payah Colony today, an hour after Lord Turna erected the shield there. The plasma nuke capsules popped and just died in the air!"

Vegita felt a huge fierce grin spread across his face. It had worked! It had all worked perfectly! And just in time for Payah.

"The enemy was cloaked," the girl went on, "But the colony governor general sent out ships through the shield window, against Lord Turna’s advice. They fired wide scatter bursts in every direction and blew one Maiyosh-jin ship out of the sky with a lucky shot, and crippled another. The ships were cloaked, but the debris they shed when you wing one wasn’t, so our ships stalked the second ship for a while. They caught a mayday signal from an encrypted code we broke only a week ago. Lord Turna said the exact words were this: ‘Dead White Command! Dead White Command! Do not approach, my Prince! The monkeys have a new defense weapon!' Their engine core blew before they could be taken prisoners, Ouji-sama, but Lord Turna says we managed to jam their transmission." The girl grinned breathlessly. "The King will order every world in the direct line of that transmission, from Paysah to the edge of the galaxy purged. Now, it is only a matter of time until we find the Red Prince’s hide-away!"

"No!" Vegita said, frowning. "He will get wind of it if we purge in a straight line toward him. He will be long gone before we reach his base!" Vegita swore softly. To be so close and know that the bastard would elude the Empire once again! But…no. His father would not act so rashly. He would think the matter through first. And this would buy Vegita some time to find Jeiyce’s base world on his own!

Bardock had gone suddenly pale with shock. He turned blazing eyes to Vegita’s. "My Prince…we must go back to your villa! I think…I am afraid I will jinx what I suspect by speaking until I know!"

They set down moments later at the villa and Bardock nearly tore through the house to the library. He pulled up a holo starchart from the desk computer and did a furious calculation. "Give me the co-ordinates of the transmission, girl!"

Anyan recited the numbers with studied care, reading the off the hyper wave print out in her hand. Bardock laid another set of co-ordinates into the equation, and stared down at the nearly instantaneous result on the screen.

"We have him, Ouji-sama," he said softly. "I knew it. ‘Dead White Command.’ There are seventy-nine systems in a direct line of transmission between Paysah and Jeiyce’s base." He glanced up, his eyes shining. "Tsiru-sei, my Prince. A dead, white world of snow and ice, where no one would look or even venture because of the quarantine."

"Dead White Command," Vegita repeated with a soft snarl.

A shrill alarm sounded, high and angry, from the comlink on Bardock’s wrist. The man glanced down in annoyance, then his face tensed. He rose to his feet, clattering the chair to the floor behind him. "It’s Bulma’s personal emergency page," he said sharply. "There must be trouble at Med Center."

"That persistent, fat fuck!" Vegita spat. "He must be very enamored of injury to try setting up shop in Med Center again so soon!"

They did not find Mousrom at Med Center. The main entrance facing the landing pad was a cluster of frightened-looking medics, several of whom turned and ran at the sight of Vegita’s angry face. Bulma was not among them. One man, a tall, green-skinned fellow with the build of a warrior, a young man Vegita remembered as having been one of Scopa’s surgical staff physicians, stepped forward. His face was bleak.

"I sent the message, Ouji-sama," he said urgently. "We---we did not realize what had happened until a few minutes ago, my Prince! Please believe that!"

Vegita began to grow cold all over. "Where is Bulma?"

"She took an early lunch with Scopa and her son in the garden conservatory," the surgeon said. "The gardens are open to the sun so the---the flowers there will grow. They---they must have taken her then."

"Taken?!" He grabbed the man and shook him. Vegita felt his breath begin to seize in his chest.

"She is nowhere in Med Center, Ouji-sama," the other man said. "Neither she nor Scopa nor the boy. They have not been seen for more than five hours!"

A hard hand clamped on Vegita’s shoulder, bringing the world back into sharp focus. "Kharda City," Bardock hissed. "Mousrom will have taken them there!"

The flight north was the most frenzied, lightning fast trip of his life. He flew hounded by a thousand horror-struck visions of what Mousrom might have done to her in five hours of having Bulma in his hands. It took less than a quarter of an hour before the mesa of the stark mountain fortress city loomed into view. They fell upon it like angels of destruction.

Bardock’s feet had not touched the ground before he began to kill. He tore through the first round of guards, howling curses like a mad thing. Vegita simply waded through them, locked inside a cold, deathly calm rage the likes of which he had never known. He blasted everything, living and inanimate, from his path, burning his way to the Inquisitor’s cells. A face loomed up before him, one he knew he should recognize. Urima, one of Mousrom’s chief lackey’s.

He reached out, deaf to the meaningless words the man was saying, and shook him like a fish in a sea shrike’s mouth. "Where is she?"

"I---I cannot---"

Vegita tore the man’s right arm from its socket at the shoulder. "Where?!" He roared over Urima’s screams.

"In---in the n-new special su-su-suspects facility…the old…old courtesans’ wing…royal palace…"

Vegita hurled him away like a stone and launched himself into the air, burning the air around him, without a glance back. He felt rather than saw Bardock lob a monolithic blast at the city as he rose into the sky on Vegita’s heels, his face black with fury. Kharda City vanished in a fiery mushroom cloud of black rock and dust.

Half an hour to Kharda and back! Another half hour for Mousrom to hurt her, rend her, mutilate her! Vegita shrieked and threw every ounce of strength he possessed into his forward movement, feeling a tidal rush of new power roll in with each nightmare image that flashed before his mind’s eye.

A swirling, rising vortex of terrified, sobbing horror laced inside a strangely familiar Ki struck him like a blow as he reached the eaves of the Capital.

Romayn’s Ki soared upward like a fuel-doused fire, shrieking inside a hurricane of newborn rage. A great section of the Palace antechambers blew apart in a hailstorm of fiery debris. An instant later, Vegita struck ground zero of the blast like a falling star, honing in on the weeping child’s voice, still resonating in his mind through the boy’s Ki.

He tore through chunks of rubble, his heart frozen in his chest. There was no name for the kind of fear he was drowning in, for his terror of what he might find. He lifted a solid section of smoldering ceiling stone…and he saw them. Bleeding, battered and covered in ash and mortar, Bulma was huddled beneath the stone slab holding Romayn in a death grip.

"Edeeta…" Romayn whimpered.

"Vegita?" She didn’t sob hysterically as the boy was doing. She lay limp and docile in his arms as he lifted her, cradling her against his chest. She was alive alive alive! He could not speak. He seemed powerless to do anything but hold her.

"Soft, lunatic weakling," said a hoarse cackle. Mousrom had clawed his way out of a pile of burning masonry. All around them, the rubble was shifting as the Inquisition guards began to do the same. "Weeping like a mewling newborn. The Saiyan no Ouji and his little ‘family’!" Mousrom spat out the word.

Vegita suddenly noticed Bardock standing at his right shoulder, growling like a leashed dire cat. "All of them except Mousrom," Vegita told him.

"Thank you, my Prince!" Bardock uttered a low snarl and fell upon Mousrom’s men like an avalanche.

"I am within my rights!" Mousrom shouted, flinching back as Bardock began killing the men around him. Vegita sat Bulma down very carefully. He began walking toward Mousrom slowly. "The---the orders for the arrests were signed by your father!"

"You lie!" Vegita hissed, still advancing, still ice cold and calm. He had come to a place so far beyond rage it was almost serene. The Inquisitor saw it too. Just as he saw his death in Vegita’s eyes.

"The Madrani had a liaison with an---an exposed Red Network operative!" Mousrom babbled. "Your own former serving wenches gave up the name of Zarbon of Rashia-sei under questioning. They had been leaking information from your own home to the Red Network for four years! It---it---it is only logical to infer your entire household was Red Network, and the doctor their go-between! The whore had to have been involv---"

Vegita smashed his fist through the Inquisitor’s forehead, shattering his skull and all that lay housed within. Mousrom fell backwards slowly. Dead as a post.

Vegita did not even watch to see the corpse strike the ground. He turned back to Bulma, burning the gore off his hand with a tiny burst of Ki. He knelt again, taking her back in his arms. He pulled her fine-boned hands up, catching a flicker of red. He uttered a sobbing snarl when he saw why. They had torn out her fingernails.

"Bulma…" He managed to say.

"They killed Scopa," she sighed sadly, her voice remote and soft. "They really thought he knew something about Zarbon. But he didn’t. He didn’t spy for Zarbon. He just loved him. He had no idea---" She shook her head as though it would erase the events of the last few hours from her memory. "After…I don’t know how long, Mousrom decided he really didn’t know anything. And he just---just killed him. He broke Scopa’s neck. Then---then they started on me…my fingers…" Her eyes were huge and unblinking, glassy with reactive shock.

Bardock was beside him, peering intently at Romayn, trying to ascertain if his son was injured---though he was not so foolish as to try and take the child from her.

"I kept cursing and yelling and screaming at him," she said softly. "He watched me for a while, then he shook his head and told me my threshold of pain was far too high for such a pretty girl. So, he decided to try something else. They had taken Rom-kun away from me and locked him in another room. Mousrom told me I could confess or watch them cut my baby into pieces…"

"Bulma…" Vegita said hoarsely. "Do not try to tell this tale now."

"When they brought Rom-kun in, he saw what they’d done to my---my fingers, and he blew the building apart." She was speaking with a frighteningly disconnected smile. "My baby loves my so much…"

"Ouji-sama," a deep, strangely gentle voice. The green-skinned doctor from Med Center. Nail? Was that his name? Vegita didn’t question where all the other people surrounding them had suddenly come from. "I should sedate her."

Vegita kissed her brow and nodded to the man in answer. "Do so. Bardock!" The man looked like a demon out of legend, covered in blood, still smoldering with rage. "Carry them back to Med Center. They are to be under guard at all times. I will be there shortly. I must speak with my father."

The icy, still-watered killing rage had not left him when he found his father taking his evening meal alone in the smallest of his audience chambers, an oddly homey room Vegita and the King had often dined in. He entered to room and said no word as he took a seat opposite the older man.

Ottousama broke the frost-bitten silence. "You have something to discuss, boy?"

"Why?" Vegita whispered.

"You are reinstated with full rank and honor as prince and heir to the Empire," his father said.

"I asked you a question, old man," Vegita said with deadly gentleness.

"You killed Mousrom, did you not?" Ottousama asked with a grim smile. "Did you hesitate or react adversely at all?"

Vegita was silent.

"I think you have your answer, boy," his father said. "Now, go see to your concubine before you make yourself king before this war is won."

Vegita rose and left quickly…before he did just that.

Before the sky had completely given way to night, the medic Nail released Bulma from his care. They had treated her hands with regen bandage swaths and sedated her heavily for the shock. Bardock bent over the bed as Vegita laid her down and pried his son from her sleeping arms. She would not release Romayn while the medics were treating her, had held onto him even after she was unconscious.

"Momma?" Romayn said softly, starting awake.

"She is well, boy," Bardock said. "We must let her sleep now. Would you like to sleep in the hearthroom with Anyan and Kyouka and the dogs?" The entire squad was camped out in the villa in a subdued vigil.

"Okay," Romayn said uncertainly. He heaved a tired, sad little sigh. "Scopa died…"

"Yes, he did," Bardock said grimly. "Very bravely. We will mourn him tomorrow." His son nodded silently and fell back into sleep with one last tiny sob of grief.

"There is a communication from the palace," Bardock muttered. "The details of the arrests."

"Destroy it," Vegita said. He tore his eyes away from the still face of the woman on the bed, and moved to the desktop comp, staring down at the scan of Tsiru-sei’s planetary specs and orbital calendar. Fool! He thought. To have chosen such a world as his base.

It was now, tonight, or never. Tomorrow would be too late. Even now, twelve hours after the intercepted hyper light message, there was no guarantee the Red Prince would still be there.

"The medic said she will not wake for more than twenty hours," Vegita murmured distractedly. The prototype of the scouter skiff is at the factory. It is the only one fitted with a rad shield at present… "Guard her well, you and your soldiers, until I return. There is a matter I must attend to."

"We are still at war, Ouji-sama," Bardock said softly. Gods, the man was quick. But Vegita only smiled, a mirthless twist of his lips, at the man’s veiled caution against doing anything irrevocable to his father in a fit of rage while the Empire was still in a state of emergency.

"I have no immediate aspirations to the throne," Vegita told him. "Guard her with your life." He left without another word, before the frighteningly perceptive bastard worked out what he was actually planning.

The brilliant audacity of setting up camp less than five hours flight time from Vegita-sei only full impressed itself on him as he dipped the skiff into a high orbit around the pearl white orb of Tsiru-sei. The first shock wave rocked the small craft, rippling over the shields as the sensor net detected his skiff and began firing round after round of plasma grenades. Apparently such a small ship wasn’t worth a missile.

He gunned the ship downward just as they hit him with a second barrage. For all the effect it had, he might had merely hit a pocket a nasty chop in his descent. He could almost smell the fear, blooming into full blown panic below as it became quickly apparent the attacks had done no damage at all. He set the ship on autopilot, programmed to circle the general region above the center of concentrated fire, and keyed the shield window to his own energy signal with a small rush of Ki into the authentication sensor. He opened the hatch below the small ship's belly, a burst of icy night air lashing his face. He took a deep breath. Now or never... He would not get another chance.

He stepped out of the skiff, the shield window tingling his skin as he passed through it. And he fell upon them out of the night sky like the wrath of the gods, a roaring mountain of power and rage, killing everything within the reach of his hands. Above the carnage, Tsiru-sei's three moons glowed brilliant and full, illuminating the night sky as bright as a storm-tossed morning.

"Jeeeeeeiyce!!!" Vegita howled, slamming one gigantic fist through the icicle-shaped spires and turrets of the beautiful White City around him. "Jeiyce! Come out and face meeee! I will let the others escape while we fight! Come out, Prince of Maiyosh-sei!" He felt the stings of their Ki-killers here and there, though he was moving too fast for them to tag him with more than a glancing blast. They will have to construct of bigger gun, he thought, chuckling through fanged teeth. His strength...his strength was so great now, that even the Ki fracturing weaponry would not bring him down---though he knew he would be too weakened to do what he meant to do if he shifted back to man form. But none of this mattered. The Oozaru change had no tie to a warrior's Ki. It was born of the body, of the inherent were-nature of his kind. He flickered here one instant, there another, too fast to let them draw a bead and take aim at his tail, burning and smashing and pulverizing everything in sight, reveling in the mad, long-lost joy of battle.

"I am here, monkey! Come and get me!"

Vegita saw him. And even lost inside the singing madness of the moons overhead, he froze, his gut suddenly full of razors, his blood running to ice in his veins. This was no vidpic or nightmare or even a sparring program. This was the smiling man who had stroked his head as though he were an obedient dog, as Vegita had kissed the tops and the Red Prince's boots. This was the hand that had taken him to the realm of madness and left in there alone, screaming in the dark like the terrified child he had become. He roared defiantly, bellowing fire at Jeiyce...but he could not, could not, advance, or even look at his enemy.

The Red Prince had begun to chuckle softly, darting forward and back, narrowly evading the great, swinging claws, the sound of his laughter ringing in Vegita's sensitive animal's hearing. He shot upward, knowing he appeared to be quite literally turning tail in flight, knowing in the deepest part of his heart that this was more than half truth. He burned higher and higher into the frozen air, leaving the base's defenders far behind. And Jeiyce was there on his heels in seconds. Only he had the strength to keep pace with Vegita.

"Stop!" His enemy screamed.

And Vegita felt his muscles rebel against his will, as he slowed and halted in his ascent, hanging motionless in the air, caught in the dark, hate-filled eyes of the Red Prince.

"Change back, boyo," Jeiyce said softly.

Vegita howled like a chained beast, sensing the other Maiyosh-jin closing fast. They knew that though their Prince had frozen their titanic enemy in his tracks for the moment, Jeiyce was still in terrible danger.

"Change back, Vegita!" Jeiyce repeated sternly, like a drill instructor barking out commands to a children's platoon. "Do as I say, monkey!"

Vegita changed, shrinking out of the giant, unmatchable Oozaru strength, head lowered, chest heaving with exertion, his entire body shuddering with the loss of size and sweet, ringing fury. He tipped his head back, searching for the pin point of light in the sky, praying to all the gods of wars that he found it before he buckled and collapsed beneath another of the Red Prince's commands. "Good boy." Jeiyce had closed on him, that hated, grinning face only a few feet from his own. The others were almost here, cheering their master as they came, taking aim at Vegita as they neared weapon's range. Far, far in the distance, he could hear the sound of cloaked ships screaming upward, the roar of invisible transport carriers leaping to hyper light speed. There it was! The light of his salvation, winking down at him from its wide wheeling arc on the very edge of the sky!

Vegita whipped his head down and looked his enemy directly in the eye. He aimed the palms of both hands downward and fired with all his might. The on-coming warriors vanished in the heat blast, and Vegita grinned viciously as the perpetual smile slipped and fell from the Red Prince’s face. And in that one instant of unguarded shock, Vegita darted forward and seized him in a strangle hold. He rose up through the sleet-edged clouds, dragging Jeiyce with him, running before the backdraft of the blast as it struck the ground like a meteor and ignited Tsiru-sei’s thin atmosphere. Vegita fired another round as he flew, a sharp debilitating spear of energy into the Maiyosh-jin’s vitals. Jeiyce convulsed against him.

Then he was in the skiff, tearing like a beam of light through the man-sized window in the rad-shield, tossing Jeiyce’s inert form onto the deck and slamming the ship’s controls into hyper light speed. He slid down the wall of the little bridge, breathing in great exhausted gulps, as the shots he’d taken, the pain and the bloodloss he had given no thought to in battle, began to hit him. They’d hit him more times than he had realized. Was there a field trauma kit in the medic’s chest?

Jeiyce lay gasping weakly several feet away in a widening pool of blood. Vegita crawled painfully over to the man’s prone body and studied the Maiyosh-jin’s injuries with cold expertise. He would need to bleed another few minutes…

"Congrats, laddie," Jeiyce croaked. "I would have bet all the lost wealth of Maiyosh House that you’d be weaving baskets permanently after we finished with you."

"You were a fool not the kill me," Vegita said coldly.

"Damn, you’ve gotten strong…" A soft chuckle. "Did I do that to you?"

Vegita only stared back. He had sunk back into that cold still place that words like ‘hate’ and ‘rage’ were insufficient to describe.

"So," murmured his enemy, "You didn’t kill me. Planning a little payback, are we? Got the wrack and hooks all ready for me?"

"Saiyan warriors," Vegita rasped. "Kill their enemies cleanly, Maiyosh-jin."

Jeiyce snickered. "Like Mousrom and his Inquisition?"

"Mousrom was not a warrior, or even a true Saiyan!" Vegita snarled. "And now he is a corpse!"

"So I hear." Jeiyce eyed him closely, his eyes growing serious and hard. "Well, well…I guess it’s true that if you beat him long enough, even the stubbornest monkey will learn a lesson or two. You’re different, laddie. No belligerence, no tantrums, no bullshit or bluster. No pleasure in causing pain. Less the princelet and more the king to be…Too bad you’ll never wear the crown."

"What the hell do you mean?!" Vegita hissed, gritting his teeth against the numb weakness beginning to pull at his limbs.

"Oh nothing…just that you’re still going to lose this war. You think my people are going to turn up their toes and die when you’ve killed me?" Jeiyce cackled weakly. "I’ll be a martyr, a tragic hero, whether you kill me in combat or gut me like a heard beast in some public execution. They’ll fight on without me." He sighed deeply, his dark eyes filling with bleak relief. "I’m ready to die. Been ready for five years. Ever since your soldiers destroyed my…my everything when they took Corsaris. I…gods, I hope Jula can’t see me from Heaven…the things I’ve done, what I’ve become."

Vegita shook his head against the lightheadedness and the pain, remembering Bulma’s words about Jeiyce. "You became the thing you fought."

Jeiyce blinked at him in surprise. He was silent for so long, Vegita begin to think the man had passed out. "No death by torture…" he said finally. "That’s a bit of good news."

"No torture," Vegita said coldly. "I will simply kill you and call us even."

Jeiyce’s expression was unreadable. "My good friend Zarbon nearly got himself nicked by Mousrom yesterday, I hear. The fat fool arrested everybody around him and let the one real Red Network spy slip away. You won’t find him either. He’s a slippery fellow." His breath was growing steadily more labored and shallow. "Zar---Zarbon tells me you’ve got a little foster son---two years old, right? A gift to your lady love to replace her real son. The one you murdered." He ignored Vegita’s low growl of anger. "Zarbon also says you dote on the girl, your pretty Bulma of Chikyuu, as though she were your moonbride. That Mousrom has used reports of your open affection for the woman and the boy to discredit your sanity in Council. It’s nice to have a family, isn’t it?" Jeiyce didn’t seem to notice the dangerous rise in Vegita’s Ki. The mere thought of Jeiyce speaking Bulma’s name, of how horrifyingly close his agents had been to her and the boy all this time, jolted Vegita’s flailing consciousness. The Maiyosh-jin’s eyes were like dead windows, looking in on a hell of grief and hate. "You want to kill me and call us even, you Saiyan fuck?! You think you’re being gracious? When your pretty lady is dragged out of Med Center by her hair and raped to death by your enemies, then we’ll be even! When your foster son is taken by his feet and his brains dashed out against a wall, when your father is cut down and torn apart by my warriors, and the world you love is burned to a spinning ball of slag around Vegita-sei’s sun---then I will call us even! Not before!" Jeiyce heaved a wet, shallow sob of fury, his eyes fluttering as consciousness began to desert him. "Not before…"

Vegita leaned forward unsteadily and lay his hand on the Maiyosh-jin’s belly wound, sealing the blood flow with a gentle pulse of heat. He’d had to wait until the Red Prince lost enough blood and grew too weak to move or wake during the five hour trip back to Vegita-sei. The energy for that simple task took all he had. Vegita slumped forward onto the deck beside Jeiyce and slept.

The alarm cut through the shallow sleep laced with pain and fatigue. Vegita clambered slowly to his feet, tottering over to the nav computer and keying in his authentication code, waiting a long, impatient minute for traffic control to open a window for the skiff. He grinned faintly, laying in a distinct set of landing coordinates, before sinking down into the pilot’s chair as he watched the moon’s red rays filtering through the clouds as he descended through them. He had sunk into a light doze by the time the soft jolt of the ship touching down jostled him awake. He stood slowly, straightening his back, and made his way carefully to where Jeiyce lay, still unconscious. He gripped the Maiyosh-jin by the collar of his armor, and drug him along the ground as he hit the hatch control and strode down the ramp into bright morning sunshine. The ring of guards stood down, and the wave of murmuring wonder rippling through the throng of warriors gathered around the rim of the roof of the royal palace’s Council Chamber.

A figure stepped forward, his black opal eyes shining with pride and joy. "What gift have you brought me, Prince of Vegita-sei?" His father asked in a loud voice.

"The first of our enemies, Ottousama," Vegita responded in kind. "Jeiyce of Maiyosh, the Red Prince of Corsaris! I have defeated him, and beg your leave to give him a coward’s execution two months hence, on the day of your Centennial. For you and the Empire, my father!" Vegita knelt down in the sudden silence, knowing his father alone could see the black rage still welling inside him as their eyes met, knowing Ottousama knew well that nothing was forgiven. But a small, pleased smile crooked the edge of his father’s mouth nevertheless. The King lay his hand on Vegita’s right shoulder, a formal blessing.

"You have done well, my son."

The cheer that rose up around them was deafening, but Vegita only heard the quiet words his father spoke, for his ears alone. "Rest this night, boy. Come to me tomorrow and we will reach an understanding."

He arrived at the villa and commanded the warriors he had left standing watch over Bulma’s sleep to leave in a quiet voice that silenced their joyous praise. He rejected Bardock’s offer the send for a physician to tend his wounds. The older man left with only a solemn nod, carrying his son under one arm. Vegita bathed and bandaged the host of superficial burns and gouges he had taken on Tsiru-sei in med patches, feeling the worst of the fatigue from the Ki-killer blasts beginning to fade. Jeiyce’s allies would have to design stronger weapons in the future.

They would not stop fighting, as Jeiyce had said, just because their prince was slain. There was still Dodoria to hunt down, and the hidden mastertech. Whoever he was, the rebels’ secret weapons smith was simply too dangerous to be allowed to live, even if he had ceased to build for the Red Demons. Though Vegita doubted the hidden engineer would ever be found alive. Jeiyce would never have let such an asset escape him or quit his ranks if the mastertech still lived.

He moved silently into the bedroom that had begun life as a study and slipped into bed beside his woman. He raised one fine-boned hand and inspected her fingers. The nails had grown back perfectly. His enemy was overthrown and captured. His disgrace reversed, his rank and title returned to him under the grace and good will of his father. His people were as safe as it was possible to keep them. And none of these things gave him as much peace and joy of mind and spirit as the woman who’s frail body lay warm against his. He kissed the palm of her hand lightly and sank into sleep.

He woke to the soft sound of weeping, his arms tightening around her instinctively. He propped up on one elbow, not speaking, only holding her, as she wailed as though her heart were torn in half. Little by little, the sobs tapered down into streaming tears, then sniffles, then sad-eyed silence. And still he said nothing.

"It’s my fault," she whispered. "I---I could have said something while they were---were hurting him, but I was afraid of what would happen to Rom-kun. I should have spoken up! I should have confessed to anything they wanted to save him!"

"It is not your fault," he said sharply. "It is Mousrom’s fault. And he has paid with his life."

"Scopa…" She moaned the name softly. "He never hurt anyone in his life. He saved more lives than I can count. And he---he---" She sat up slowly, her eyes beginning to burn. "Everything that’s good and decent always gets torn to pieces! All my life…everyone and everything I’ve ever loved or cared about. And I just get back up every time my life is destroyed and start building another one, when I know…" She sobbed brokenly as her voice continued to rise angrily. "When I know it’ll all be blow to hell in the end! Romayn and Scopa and---and you and everyone in my life. I’m going to wake up one day and find Rom-kun’s been killed in a training exercise after they take him to the children’s barracks in two years. Or that you or Bardock or Kyouka or Articha has been killed in battle somewhere. Or that your father has finally ordered you to put me aside, and you pack me off world as a free woman, but---but I’ll have to leave Rom-kun behind, and---"

"That will not happen," He said flatly. "Not if I live to see a thousand years. Bulma…hear me!" He rose up to sit facing her and took her slim shoulders, drawing her closer to him. "I will not tell you no one you value will die. That will happen. But my father will not command me in any way ever again."

The words hung there in the air between them, as her tear-streaked face paled slowly. "You didn’t---"

"No…" He growled. "But it was a near thing."

She shook her head sadly, grief coating every syllable. "Your father told you that he would ‘help you set yourself to rights.’ He knew seeing us in Mousrom’s hands, would break the geas in your mind. And all it cost him was your love and Scopa’s life…"

"The war will soon be over," He told her, not wanting to sort through the truth of her words. He was still too angry. He breathed deeply and told her all that he had done while she slept. "I will execute him on the first night of Moontime, the day of my father’s Centennial, in eight weeks time. In spite of what Jeiyce believes, the war will die with him, though not immediately. We will hunt the rebels still. Seeking them out and battling them where we can find them will keep us vigilant and in fighting trim for many years to come, but, as you have said, they will be difficult to find. And with your rad shields, they cannot strike at us." He held her eyes in his, shaking with the effort it would take to say the things he meant to say aloud. "When Jeiyce is dead, and the Empire is once more stable and strong, I will take the throne. My father---" He stopped, swallowing hard, as a sudden, vivid visualization of that day leapt to his mind, dousing the burning rage…a picture of Ottousama lying cold and dead. Dead by Vegita’s own hand.

"He knows," she said softly. "He knew signing that arrest order would make it easier for you. He knows you’re ready."

He nodded silently. "When I am king, I will serve my people and protect them and lead them. I will give my life for them, if need be. But I will order all things in my own household as I wish, custom and propriety be damned. I will take no queen. I will find a strong warrior to bear my son…but he will be yours to raise. You---you have proven yourself a gifted instructor of kings to be. Romayn will be his foster brother, his first lieutenant, and his body guard. As such, he will be trained in the Palace alongside my heir, and he will not go the barracks. You are free, woman. Go if you will, you and the boy. Or stay and help me rebuild my empire. It is your right, since you have helped to save it."

She kissed him, shaking in a renewed storm of weeping, though her tears seemed to be equal parts sorrow and joy mingled. She pressed closer, soft and pliant against his naked body, drawing out the kiss until his breath began to come short and his blood began to burn as it coursed through his heart.

"Make love to me," she whispered, a soft command.

"Bulma…"

"I need you," she sobbed. "I want…I want to stop hurting. I want to feel like I did that last day at Bardock’s house. Happy and loved and at peace. I want you, Vegita…please…"

There was no guilt or inverted loathing in her eyes, no doubt. Not a wisp of hesitation. Oh gods…the long nights of lying beside her, barred by his own heart from anything sweeter than a child’s innocent embrace… He plunged his fingers into the sapphire silk of her hair and lay her down, trembling as though he were in the grip of a heart seizure, forcing himself to touch lightly, with the same gentle caress he had used when they lay together in that flowered meadow, forcing himself to remember that the least uncontrolled flex of muscle or thrust would hurt her. He kissed her mouth again, nipping the lower lip slowly, and began to work his way down her body. Neck to breasts, tasting and suckling her nipples until she began to gasp for breath. Breasts to the flat, smooth plain of her stomach, his body suspended above hers, barely touching, as his mouth sought lower still. Stomach to kneecaps, brushing over all the lay between lightly and quickly with his tongue and lips, feeling a pleased smirk tug at his mouth as she made a low growl of protest.

"Patience, woman," he chuckled softly, kissing the inside of one silken thigh, as he rolled his mouth upward with maddening slowness. Tasting and teasing, tongue darting and flicking with delicate, sweet cruelty, he sent her tumbling over the edge without him again and again. Until she threaded her hands through the stiff, black spikes of his hair, her back arched like a taut-strung bow, and shrieked for him to take her.

He kissed his way up her body, retracing the route he had taken, eye to eye with her now, face to face. He brushed her lips again, deepening to a fevered, desperate kiss…and slowly, gently, moved inside her. And stopped, hard and still, less than an inch inside.

"Vegita…" She whimpered.

"Shhh…" He fought with all the will he possessed to keep his own voice steady, to keep his entire body from shuddering apart with desire. With the terrifying joy of what he was about to do. If she would allow it. If she gave him leave. He drew back and pushed in again, still gentle, in a searing slow agony of slow, shallow thrusts, never more than an inch deep, tilting his hips from side to side, then up, then down, lost in the endless blue of the eyes of the woman beneath him, deeper than Vegita-sei’s deepest sea.

"Please…" She was gasping. "Vegita---"

"Do you want me?" He whispered against her lips.

"Yes…Yes!"

He drew in a long steady breath of air, laden with her scent, still sinking in and out of her. "You are free, Bulma…Romayn is yours to keep. This world is yours, your home." He stopped moving, raising up, his hardness withdrawn to her threshold, drenched in sweat with the effort of holding back, of banking the fire that was threatening to burn him alive. "I swore to return to you all that I took. Home and child and freedom are yours, as much as a mortal man can replace such things---everything except your mate. I will give you that if you will have me, Bulma." He kissed her again, still trying to fathom her heart through the windows of her eyes. "Will you have me?"

Her face was quiet, though her heart was hammering against his. "Do you love me?"

He opened his mouth to speak, but his jaw clenched around the words instinctively. "Bulma---"

"Do you love me?" She repeated implacably, her brilliant azure gaze hardening. "The man I loved at Bardock’s house, the man you should have been, told me he loved me. I see him inside you. More than I ever imagined possible. He’s not gone…he’s a part of you. I see him in everything you’ve done since we returned, but you have to bring him out a little more. You have to say it!"

But he could not. The words would not have left his lips if his life hung upon the utterance. "I---I---" He growled in frustration. "Bulma…" There was another way. He drew her up with him, astride his lap as he rose to kneel on the bed…and sank his teeth deep into the base of her neck, pushing all that he felt gently into the doorway of her heart through the tenuous, half-wrought mental bond he had just initiated. She felt the brush of his mind against hers, recognized it for what it was, and all that he was offering, the entirety of his self. She opened like a morning flower at daybreak, and let him in. And all that she felt for him poured back through the link, the whole measure of her heart, even as he gave her all that he was.

She flowed into him, black boiling hatred entwined with selfless, soul-deep love, pain and degradation and horror hand in hand with a sighing girl-child’s heart that leapt for joy at the mere sight of his face, at the thought of his touch. It was all inextricably intermingled, heart-breaking love and lightless, remorseless hatred. And he had earned every ounce of both. He began sobbing softly as she swept through him, as he saw the world repainted through her eyes, the monster he had been, the man he was now. Everything…except…There was one place he could not reach, standing in her mind like a locked and bolted door, encircled in a gray, horrible cloud of guilt and shame and regret. Perhaps it was the one piece of herself she would always keep separate.

Ages of shame, an eternity of sorrow and regret, would not erase the deeds he had done. But the miracle that shook him apart with soaring joy was that she loved him at all. That her love was in equal portion to the hate he so richly deserved. That the depth and breadth of her heart could reach across the chasm he had dug between them, across the hate for the man---the spoiled, fool boy---he had been, who she thought of as an enemy, dead and unmourned.

"Say it, Vegita," she said again, her voice breaking under the weight of all he felt for her, that she was the measure and definition of love to him, his instructor in all its unwritten laws, his first realization that the word was not a feeling, but the deeds of a lifetime.

"I love you!" He choked, nearly weeping like a child again as the joy inside her surged into him, over-flowing the well of her soul.

He cried out as she enveloped him completely, as she sank down over him, taking him deep inside, her mouth against his, her blue eyes full of tears. He rose into the air above the bed, moving with her in a steady slow rhythm, as a ripple of her delight at being airborne flowed into him. Faster and harder, he let her set the pace in slow increments. His thrusts deepened as she urged him on without words, tangled in the strands of her thoughts, spiraling upward with her to an unscalable summit, higher and higher, on a wave of love and hate and desire and need that seemed to sweep away his mind as the crest broke inside them at the same instant, leaving him as forgetful of past and duty and debts owed as the man who had held her in that flower-strewn field.

The words left his lips without hesitation this time, as they clung together, drifting back down on the bed to lie side by side, wrapped around each other in a damp tangle. "I loved you, Bulma," he breathed raggedly. "Oh gods, I love you…"

"I can feel you," she whispered, her voice trembling. "…still inside me…everywhere."

"We went so deep because of the moon," he said softly, his own voice unsteady. "It will be dangerous soon, for us to share the same bed…"

She kissed him, soft and lingering. "But not yet."

"Not yet," he agreed. "Sleep now…tomorrow will be a better day."

Bardock’s sharp eyes noticed Bulma’s high-necked collar the next morning, but no one else seemed to take any note of it. It occurred to him too late, as they bathed and dressed, that he had been a moon mad fool to put his mark on her visibly. Taking an alien to mate was taboo, even for a common soldier. For a crown prince---it was a death sentence for her if they were discovered, at least until he sat uncontested on the throne. But she would be working at Med Center, with Bardock hovering near at all times, until Moontime was past. Cloistering the few alien women still left on Vegita-sei after the mass rotation of all slave labor off world under Mousrom’s ‘reign’, keeping them safe from a world full of Saiyan males in rut. Securing the youngest Saiyan brats below as well, none of whom would survive the festival. Administering the time release cerebral neuro-trank injections to every single Saiyan past adolescence on the planet, to prevent accidental moonbonding. It was a very real danger, even two to three weeks before Moontime.

"Do you wish to…stay home today?" He watched her face closely, watched her think it over.

"No," she said after a moment. "I need to keep busy. It’s the best kind of therapy for me. And they’ll need me with the moon coming and---and Scopa gone…" A silent tear slid down her face and she wiped it away angrily. "Are we…are we moonbonded? I can still feel you…" A wan little smile. "I can feel how worried you are right now."

"No…" He said. "We went deeper than we should have, as I said, because of the moon. It is more than a simple marriage bond, but the intensity of the empathic link will fade as the day goes on. You understand how important it is that no one knows what is between us?"

"Yes," she said softy.

Still frowning worriedly, he watched her touch her shoulder wound lightly.

He bent to kiss the tender spot. "You must heal my mark as a first priority today. It is only an outward symbol, and dangerous for you."

Half an hour later, his hands clenched, nails cutting into the meat of his palms, he pushed open the door of his father’s sitting room. He bowed low and formally, sinking into a chair without a word of greeting.

"They tell me," his father began casually. "That it was Bardock’s son who blew up the questioning unit and half the south wing of the Palace with it. Is this true?"

"It is," Vegita said shortly. "He is uncommonly strong." He clamped his hands on arms of his chair, thinking of that long dead nameless child, the son of Paragas. If his father suggested a similar remedy to the threat he might see in Romayn, Vegita would…he would try very hard to control himself. And perhaps fail.

But Ottousama only nodded mildly. "The scouters mounted in that section registered nearly five thousand. There is a wild, powerful strain in the brat’s Turrasht ancestry. There’s royal blood in the mountain folk of that region. They have been known to show bursts of amazing strength from time to time in moments duress, but it is always short lived. What are your plans for the boy?"

"I am training him. I will keep him close and set him to guard the cradle of my heir. As Nappa guarded me."

Ottousama made a noise of approval. "And having been coddled and fairly drowned in affection by that woman of yours during his formative years will give him an unnaturally strong sense of devotion. A wise choice." His father did not fail to notice the black wave of fury radiating from Vegita at the mention of Bulma. "You did not read the arrest report I sent you."

"I had other more pressing matters," Vegita snarled softly.

His father smiled slowly, baring all his teeth. "I suppose the capture of the Red Prince would take precedence." He chuckled, a rich sound of genuine pleasure. Vegita eyed him closely, and saw the dark, hollow circles of care and exhaustion around his father’s eyes were slightly faded. It suddenly occurred to him that Ottousama must have had his first full night’s sleep since the war began. The deep lines in his face, the hints of ray flecked through the auburn-tinted black of his hair were still there though. Vegita saw again the image of Ottousama’s face, bloodless and still, saw his father’s life’s blood staining his hands---

"Hold onto the anger, boy," the soft growl of his father’s voice broke through those black thoughts. "It will make it easier when the time comes."

But it had slipped away, at least for the moment. "I will find it again when the time comes, my father," Vegita replied without any outward exchange in the hard set of his features. "But until then…I will enjoy your company."

"A hundred years is a goodly amount of time to have ruled," the King of Vegita-sei murmured. "I wish to see the moon shine red upon our world once more. I wish to celebrate my reign, and honor my son, who has shielded Vegita-sei from attack with his left hand and torn out the enemy’s heart and brains with his right. And then…then, I wish to rest, my son."

"It will be as you wish, father," Vegita said softly.

They burned Scopa’s body that evening atop Med Center as though he were a Saiyan son of Vegita-sei slain in honorable combat. Bulma stood dry-eyed, shaking with grief, as she lifted the torch to the wood. The number of medics, slave and freedmen, who attended was not surprising. The shock lay in how many Saiyan warriors hung above the funeral in silent respect for the hand that had pulled so many of them back from death’s door. Articha and Turna stood by, newly returned from delivering the shields to the colonies. Both raised wood to the pyre, as did Bardock and his squad---a thing unheard of. Though if that sent a ripple of surprise through the ranks of the assembled warriors, it was nothing compared to the gasps of astonishment that greeted Vegita when he lay his own shorn branch upon the blaze.

"It is just," he said in a loud voice, glaring up at the warriors hovering above them in the air, "that a Prince honor his good and faithful servants. Whosoever they be!"

"A good speech," his father told him later. "And a clever one. Word of it will spread throughout the Empire and serve to mollify the more valuable worlds---worlds we cannot afford at this juncture to purge---that are reluctant to climb down off the fence they’ve been sitting on for the last two years."

"It was not a political gesture," Vegita growled coldly. "A man who saved the life of the Prince of Vegita-sei more than once deserved better from us than to die in torment as a means to an end!"

"That is a lesson you will not learn until you sit on the throne, boy," Ottousama said grimly. "A king will sacrifice his servants---any one of his servants, from the highest to the most humble---for the good of the Empire."

And to that, Vegita had no answer. Because he knew with chill clarity that he would never have broken the geas without the rage and terror of seeing his woman in Mousrom’s hands. Nothing less would have sufficed.

In the weeks that followed, all of Vegita-sei prepared for the coming of the moon. And Vegita…he reveled in a kind of content and joy at simply being alive he would never have imagined possible. By day, he trained and labored upon the portable rad shields for the fleet. In the evening…gods, had he ever imagined he knew any state of true happiness before this? She was his…all his. Mind and body and heart, twined around and within the fabric of his soul. And he was hers.

They had four weeks of perfection.

Four weeks, as the sky grew a deeper shade a crimson with each passing day, as tempers began to fray, as duels and brawls began to spring up everywhere like small tremors heralding a volcano’s eruption, as Jeiyce lay in stasis inside the royal dungeons awaiting his death, guarded as no prisoner of Vegita-sei had even been. Four weeks in which Bulma built and refitted a half dozen troop carriers with her army of servo-bots, equipping the ships to haul twice the number of soldiers. Articha had petitioned the King formally in council for a royal requisition for the raw materials.

"Many of the younger females warriors---those no longer small children, but not yet of age---do not survive their first moon because their body’s have not yet matured to desire and they are not yet strong enough to defend themselves against a world full of rutting males," the older woman’s voice was bleak as the dead of winter, her eyes hard and haunted. "In decades past, I have nodded at this, thinking it just that only the strongest survive, remembering that I was only twelve my second moon and defended myself well enough. But I was uncommonly strong. Our numbers have been decimated by the war, Ou-sama, and we can ill afford to loose the girl children who will be lost during Moontime. Saiyan women are scarce at the best of time. The Chikyuu girl’s ships can carry the full tally of girls between six and fourteen who are stationed on Vegita-sei."

The process of sequestering some twenty thousand Saiyan brats between the ages of infancy and five, would have been insurmountable had the on world population of youngsters been larger. But only a small percentage of Saiyan children were deemed strong enough to grow to maturity on the homeworld, and there were no brats in the incu-pods at present. The King had put a ban on all breeding a year ago for the duration of the war because incu-ward took up so many resources. As the entire ward was empty, it was a simple matter of sedating the bulk of the children and storing them in the incu-pods. But this only accommodated three quarters of the children, and even sedation and a shield of lunar reflectors would not put some of them out completely. As Scopa had said, Med Center would soon be a madhouse of hyper active brats.

At thirty days til Moontime, the process was nearly complete though the moon was still more than a month away. The brats were the first to loose their minds in the days preceding full moon, so it was necessary to knock them senseless earlier.

Four more weeks until Moontime…

He stood at the east window, watching the sun boil up into the reddish sky. Fall was here by the count of the calendar, but gods, it was hot…He listened to the sounds of morning, hearing Bulma stirring back in their rooms, the whir of the servo-bots preparing breakfast, hearing Romayn tearing through the garden and the yips of the dogs.

Perhaps it was the unusually strong link with his woman that anchored him to her cooler blood, or perhaps it was the heady joy he had been emmersed in since taking her to wife, since she had accepted with a glad heart all he wished to give, but at thirty scant days until moonrise, Vegita felt no ill effects. No shortness of temper, no increasing, irrational desire to change, to tear and crush in the sweet mindless joy of the Oozaru form. No insatiable, violent need to have his woman in an animal madness---

It was time to send her away, he thought grimly. Before, not after, he began to show symptoms of moon madness. A high yip of pain, followed by a terrified wail cut through his thoughts. He found Romayn sitting beside the whimpering figure of Yaro, sobbing in horror, one small fist crammed into his mouth. Baka was hiding under the trailing vine flowers nearby, whining in fear.

Vegita knelt and examined the prone beast. Its ribs and sternum were cracked. He touched a nerve at the base of the animal’s skull and it stilled, unconscious. Romayn moaned faintly.

"You were playing tag with them?" Vegita asked quietly, though he knew already what must have happened.

The boy nodded. "I caught him and I---I hugged too hard…" Romayn was shuddering with hiccuping sobs. "I’m a bad boy! I h-h-hurt him!"

"Yes," Vegita said solemnly. "Do you see the sky, boy? How red it grows? More so each day."

"The moon?" Romayn sniffled.

"As it draws closer, we begin to go mad. We grow more violent, it becomes difficult to think, we become increasingly unable to control our basest impulses. Or to control our strength. That is why you hurt Yaro. The moon effects us more when we are very young."

"Edeeta…" The boy said with soft, dawning horror. "What if I hug Momma too hard?"

"That will not happen," Vegita told him. "Today you will go with her to Med Center and she will fix Yaro. Then she will give you an injection that will make you sleep for a month…until the moon had passed. When you wake, it will be all over." He glance up at the sudden sense of Bulma’s presence in the garden doorway. She was watching them silently, her face as pale as bone. "And Bulma will stay with you, cloistered in the incu-ward…so that I do not hurt her."

She left him with a kiss and sweet words and departed, child and animals in tow. But she returned that afternoon, her beautiful face flushed, her eyes shining with fear and worry and joy.

"What is it?" He could not work out what the mismatched emotions playing across her features might mean.

"I’m pregnant," she said softly.

He simply stared at her, the words refusing to register in his mind, even as his mind played back through the delirious happiness of the night he had made her his mate, how he had held nothing in reserve as he made love to her…

Slowly, he knelt before her and lay his head against her flat stomach, searching inward. Oh gods…it was there. Strong and vibrant and growing and…

He closed his eyes tightly, thinking furiously, trying desperately to turn away from the truth he already knew, trying in vain to see a way around it.

But there was no way.

"What do you do," he had asked Scopa one evening during his months of forgetfulness in Bardock’s house. "When it is a choice between saving the mother and saving the child?"

"I save the mother," Scopa’s solemn ghost voice replied. "Always."

"I cannot let it be, Bulma." He said the words with more force than he intended.

She stared down at him for the longest time, her face almost confused, slowly blanching of all color. Then she sagged, sinking down to her knees beside him, limp as a doll in his arms. He held her tightly, waiting for some sort of reaction, tears of curses, but nothing came. A cold fist of ice locked around his heart as he drew back, staring into her slack face…Oh god…he knew that look, that unplugged, blank expression of ‘not here’.

"Bulma!" He shook her, terror growing with each second she failed to react. "Bulma! BULMA!"

She shivered and focused on his face at the sound of his scream, and he wanted to sob like a child Romayn’s age with relief. Slowly, gently, she disengaged herself from his arms and stood, straight and proud as the queen she would never be. When she raised her eyes to his again, they were clear and cold, her face a cool emotionless mask.

"It cannot be, Bulma," he repeated slowly, staring her down. "I am not yet King. The Empire is not yet out of danger. Even if these things had come to pass…Bulma, it would rend the Empire in half. You know this. There would be civil war, perhaps even open rebellion if my people decided I had lost my wits to have sired a half blood as my heir. And more than that…you would not live to bear the boy. Every warrior of my race will turn his hand against you when it is known what you carry. It is likely even Bardock’s folk, and certainly Articha and Turna, would turn against us. I will not see you die!" He stood, his face hard and resolute, ready to battle her to the wall with the logic of his words, ready to command her as he had not in…in a very long time.

But she nodded her head in understanding, still cold and aloof, the threads of the invisible bond silent and motionless, telling him nothing---only that she was holding her heart separate from his be sheer force of will.

"I understand," she whispered. "I’ll take care of it tonight." She turned on her heel and left, speaking softly as she walked away, not pausing. "Enjoy the festival, Ouji-sama," she said distantly. She left him kneeling, too stunned to speak or follow after her. She didn’t look back as she went.

The days that followed were a red-rimming blur. He knew he must have added the finishing touches to securing a secondary shield around the shield generator itself, but he had no clear memory of any details. The villa was too quiet, silent as a tomb by night.

Bulma locked Med Center down two days later, buttressed and sealed in strictest quarantine now, shut away from the moon, even the air above which would carry the maddening scents of blood, battle and sex soon. From his woman came nothing but ominous silence, though he needed no medic underling on the vidlink telling him that Doctor Briefs was occupied at the moment to know that he had been…shut out. He could not feel her, any part of her, except a sense, an almost tangible mental image of a locked and bolted door that vented a cold gust of ice whenever his spirit drew near.

She was well guarded, at least. He had commanded Bardock, his squad, and as an afterthought, Rikkuum, to go into cloister with her, keeping order among the older brats too old for the incu-pods---and keeping her safe from any mishaps that might occur in the presence of so many over-excited Saiyan children.

The hurt, the numb, hollow helpless incomprehension of how quickly it had all gone to hell between them, lay down with him each night and worried at his every thought by day. Not that he was thinking too clearly as the last days before moonrise crept by. But he could not have let her keep the boy! He could not! To do so would be to destroy all they had fought to save, and condemn her and the boy to a violent death at the hands of his own people, sooner of later.

As the days drew out into weeks without a word from her, as the season of the moon drew closer, shredding the edges of his sanity, turning pain and loss to anger, a sweet, burning anticipation of the festival began to take hold of the foreground of his thoughts.

Eight days before moonrise, his father called him to a private audience that went...badly. Vegita sat before the older man, his eyes red-rimmed, hard with the effort it took to simply concentrate. The King seemed calmer, his eyes still coal black, his hands still steady. The moon always took the old in its teeth less violently.

"The Chikyuu woman," Ottousama ground out.

"Now is not the time for this conversation, Ottousama," Vegita cut him off in a low, tense voice, the image of Bulma’s bloody, nailess little fingers leaping to his mind’s eye, forcing him to clench his hands together…so that he would not wrap them around his father’s throat.

"Do you know what they call her throughout the Capital, boy?" Ottousama went on as though he had not heard, as though he did not sense Vegita’s rising anger. "The ‘Saiyan no Ojo! You are the hero of the day today, but public opinion is a fickle mistress. At the moment, they look upon your devotion to the girl with indulgent amusement. But it will soon become readily apparent that she is more than an eccentric passion, and that you have no plans to set her aside. Ever." Vegita stared at him stonily, not contradicting this truth. His father uttered an irritable growl. "Your people have not forgotten that your sanity was in question, that your rank and title were stripped from you only a few short weeks ago. What will you do when they begin to whisper that the ‘Saiyan no Ojo’ is the true heir to my throne? That she controls your weak, broken mind and rules through you as---"

"What do you want, old man?!" Vegita snarled, standing up, leaning forward into his father’s face, red eyes blazing murderously into the old man’s black gaze.

"See to her, boy," Ottousama said softly. "Now. Tonight. Quick and painless while she sleeps."

The silence stretched out between them, cold and deadly.

"Not tonight, my father," Vegita finally whispered. "Not ever."

"You never read the arrest report I sent you," the King snapped. "Distance yourself from the fact that the girl is your most treasured possession and think like a king! Your former chef was a top Red Network operative. Your kitchen wenches were high level informants, passing information to Zarbon, and through him, to Jeiyce. The Rashai-jin passed stolen council notes and records, war plans and fleet movements to the Red Prince even after he began to travel about the Empire as part of the morale corp. Through the kitchen slaves? Perhaps…but in the year before you left to go to war, who had better access to your personal effects? Who had the best reason to hate you and every Saiyan alive, of all the slaves in your household? I do not believe she was a servant of the rebels very long. I think the attack on Arbatsu soured her toward the rebels, and the gift you made to her of Bardock’s son sealed her loyalty to you for all time. And now," his father snorted. "She is every pit as besotted with you as you with her. But she was inside their ranks at one point, and she knew Zarbon for what he was. Who could have warned Zarbon, and thus Jeiyce, of the purge of Shikaji? Not the maid servants. Who did you tell before you left, Saiyan no Ouji? Who, outside the royal council, knew?!"

Vegita shook his head. "No…no! You are discounting too much! Surveillance and---and the Madrani pilots and tech who flew the troop carriers, and…" He did not wish to, could not, have this argument now! He could barely think coherently, let alone list the dozens of possible leaks surrounding the assault on Shikaji that did not point to his woman. "Later…" He managed to say. "We will speak of this after…"

"Later then," Ottousama growled into the tension-riddled silence. "When you are thinking more clearly.

On the eve of moonrise, he sat in his chair by the west window, gazing out at the bloody sunset, growling softly like an animal in the early stages of rabidity. Thinking of her face…cold and beautiful as she stood there hating him for choosing her safety, her life, over their son's.

He watched her until she was out of sight, the haunting strains of her sweet durge still ringing in his ears. His heart was caught in his throat, his stomach snarled in a twisted knot. Fool! Why had he not turned her away last night?! Why?! To have taken her to his bed on the very eve of moonrise was beyond unforgivable!

But it would be well again. I love you, she had said. Kami help me, I can’t stop loving you! It would take time for things to be right between them again, but…I love you, Vegita…She was his and would remain so, her anger forgotten if not her grief. He had not lost her or her heart. He wanted to shriek at the sky with joy, even through the horror of what he had done to her.

Today he would begin the festival with the execution of the Red Prince at sunset. And with that first victorious bloodletting, the season of the moon would begin. A glad day, he thought, closing his eyes, his chest vibrating as he purred softly---and he saw again the nightmare image of the wounds and claw marks he had put on Bulma’s body---

Damndamndamn! Why had she come last night?!

But there was no reason to reign in grief or regret or---or anything today, was there? Not today. Tonight the moon would come and he would rage and roar to the blood-red heavens and it would be good!

He flew over the Capital, eyes brushing across the overflowing spaceport on the rim of the coast. Some of the newest arrivals had been crammed onto the same landing pads. All the children of Vegita-sei who could find the means to come home had returned for his father’s Centennial and the coming of the moon. The city was still. Ominously so. All guard duty and barracks drills, all work and formality of any kind was set aside for the next three nights, with the one exception of those warriors he had hand picked to guard the shield generator. Everyone would lie inside in a fitful sleep all this day, fighting the growing urge to change until the celebration commenced. He wheeled in the air, swooping lower back toward the Palace. The streets of the city were littered with the bodies of wounded who had taken the worst of some fight or brawl during the night. They lay in their own blood, untended, nursing their injuries as best they could. Med Center was a shielded fortress now, and no help or aid would come from the healers inside until the moon had passed. He had never once in his life thought to question this, he mused darkly, but…so much Saiyan blood had been spilled in the last three years. And now they would celebrate victory by killing each other. He shook his head with a soft snarl, trying to clear it, wiping the sweat from his face. The heat was rising steadily, burning inside his skin, even with the warm wind whipped in his face as he flew.

He knew it was foolish to be out of doors before nightfall, but there was something he must do. There were questions he must ask his enemy, and tonight would be too late.

The route he took through the palace passages, down into the lowest level of the royal dungeons, was a dim blur, but with each floor he descended, he felt his mind clear a bit more. The guards before the energy stasis field were cool and lucid, their eyes black and unclouded by moon madness, though they seemed to be as drenched in their own sweat as Vegita. It was only marginally cooler here, even this far below ground.

"Feeling a bit out of sorts today, laddie?" Jeiyce asked him cordially. The bastard was lounging inside his cell, only a few hours from a gruesome, violent execution, and he showed no concern, no expression other than his habitual easy grin.

"It is nearly midday, Prince of Maiyosh," Vegita said grimly. "In seven hours, I will tear your heart from your chest and eat it. Then I will toss your carcass to my nobles and they will devour what remains."

"Decent of you to kill me first," Jeiyce murmured.

"There are two things I wish to know. If you tell me true, I swear to you as Saiyan no Ouji, who will very soon be king, and upon my honor as a warrior of Vegita-sei, that I will spare the lives of all the non-combatants and children of your race when they are found. They may live planetbound and unmolested on the worlds you have hidden them on, so long as they never raise a fist against the Empire again. You will die, your war will be lost, but your people will live on."

Jeiyce was no longer smiling, but eyeing him with a sharp wary frown. He knew enough of Saiyan law and custom to know how binding such an oath would be on Vegita's part. "Just for the sake of argument," he said quietly. "What two things would you like to know?"

"Where is Dodoria?"

"Oh," Jeiyce grinned. "I guess you would want to tear his heart out too. Fair enough. But I haven't a clue. He was on Tsiru-sei, but he left in a hurry just after you arrived. He had an appointment to deliver quite a number of packages to our mutual friend Zarbon." The Maiyosh-jin's grin widened. "Not to worry though. I don't know precisely where Dodoria is at the moment, but I do know he has plans to call on you very soon."

"Here on Vegita-sei?" Vegita said with a grim smile. "He must be very anxious to die."

"Next question?" Jeiyce asked amiably.

"Who is the mastertech? The man who built the miniaturization capsules, the invisibility shields and the Ki-killers?"

"Again, no idea," Jeiyce leaned forward, peering into Vegita's damp face, smiling slightly. "Zarbon was my go-between. The stubborn bastard would never give up the engineer's name or location to us, even after the squeamish little gearhead backed out and stopped making new weapons. The Mastertech could be anyone. Could have been Zarbon's little Madrani boyfriend for all I know. How's that fever of your, Prince Vegita? Still rising?"

"What the hell are you talking about?!" Vegita snapped. The man knew more than this. He must! He was lying through his---

"Dodoria left Tsiru-sei with a shipment of packages for Zarbon and his cell of spies," Jeiyce said softly. "They all have specialized long duration camo-shields that allow them to move around for weeks at a time unseen and masks their Ki as well. Three weeks ago, Saiyan no Ouji, Zarbon of Rashia-sei brought a gift to Vegita-sei and all her children. The Tsiru-jin Plague."

"What...Vegita hissed. He was shivering in the cloying heat, trying to absorb the man's words.

Soft laughter, the stuff of nightmares, rippled out of the stasis shield. "It's part of the reason we set up shop on Tsiru-sei in the first place. We re-engineered the bug that killed al the Tsiru-jin, boyo. Redesigned it especially for the Saiyan race. While I've taken a well deserved vacation these last few weeks, Dodoria and Zarbon have been busy as hive insects, making sure every planet in known space infested with your kind had been thoroughly hosed down with the virus at the same time. It's a nasty one, too, Vegita. Hemmoragic. It's been incubating inside your entire race for twenty days now. We timed the release of the bug bombs so we'd have a special present to give your father on the day of his Centennial. And because of the moon's arrival, no one on Vegita-sei would think twice when they began to show symptoms. Clever, huh?"

"You lie!" Vegita slammed both hands against the stasis force field with a roar of rage. It was a lie! A foolish, desperate, dead man's fantasy.

"Your people started dying last night and no one noticed," Jeiyce crooned. "Anyone who saw bodies lying around in public just took them for early casualties of Moontime. If you disbelieve me, laddie, go back up and look around. Do it quickly though. The plague hits like a Ki burst---all at once. By the time the fever sweats start, you've only got an hour or so left. Go up, Prince of Vegita-sei. You are the strongest of your race." Jeiyce laughed merrily. "You'll probably last long enough to see your whole world die before you."

He shook like a leaf with the effort it took not to kill the man before him. But some deep instinct, the horror-ridden eye of his own imagination that could visualize his world burned, his people hunted and butchered like vermin, his woman and all those he valued slain, told Vegita that death would be a mercy to this man. It was what Jeiyce wanted. He wheeled and hurled himself into the lift to the surface, twisting his mind away from the flushed, feverish faces if Jeiyce's guards.

It was a lie! A lie, a lie!

He hit the landing as the lift slowed to a halt and sped through the palace, not thinking, not questioning where his feet were taking him until he reached his destination, not looking to either side to note the hot, crypt-like silence, the empty, still halls until he stumbled over the stiff, gore-splattered corpses of the Elite Royal Guards who had stood outside the King's private wing of rooms. No one would notice the blood today, or even think to wonder why the King had not yet risen, well past noon...

Nonono!

He tore the doors of their hinges, scanning with bleary senses for the presence he knew as well as his own Ki signature. He stood on the threshold of his father's bedchamber, trembling like the tiny boy who had stood in these rooms years ago, awaiting punishment for some tantrum or misbehavior. He pushed through the swinging door to the bedroom, cursing himself for a shivering coward...

"Ottousama," Vegita said in a remarkably steady voice. He sat down in the chair of the bedside study, a testament to the axiom that a King and sleep were never well aquatinted. A surreal wave of horror washed over him, a shaking denial of what his eyes were seeing...and all that it meant.

The King of Vegita-sei had never made it out of his bed. He---he must have begun to bleed out in his sleep and awakened too weak to move or call out.

"Boy?" The dead man whispered, a hellish, cracked echo of his deep, harsh rumble.

"I am here, Father," Vegita whispered.

"Poison..." Ottousama murmured. "...bad death for a warrior...sneaky Maiyosh-jin...finally got me."

Vegita said nothing. Gods of small mercies, let him die believing that! Without knowing that---that all his race were---were---

"I've lived long..." Vegita-ou choked and spat black, thick blood, heart's blood "Sooner have died fighting...man cannot have everyth..." One red-stained hand gripped Vegita's, his entire, thick-muscled frame convulsing with effort as he fought for his last, blood-choked breaths. "You...made me proud, boy! So very prou..."

No trump sounded. The heavens did not fall. No cry or herald hailed the passing of Vegita, Saiyan no Ou, Emperor by his own strong, bloody hand of all the galaxy. He simply died.

Vegita heard himself make some sort of soft snarling moan. The room was spinning in a scarlet whirl of horror. It could not be so! Not all of Vegita-sei...not everyone! He launched himself through the roof with a shriek of denial, whipping low through the city, looking down with new eyes, seeing the bodies strewn through the streets, curled into poses of wrenching agony in their rigor. The blood...the blood looked like nothing more than some weakling who'd been fool enough to get himself beaten to death. He was not aware of just when it really struck him, the full weight and inescapable, horrific scale of it all. He did not know when he began to wail like a grief-maddened shade, for his father, for his people, for his world, tearing in aimless, burning circles in a wide, flaming wheel above the Capital, giving way to the change in a screaming, sobbing fury that grew to a monstrous roar. And because of this, he did not see the beam of light that cut him down.

He was lying on his back, unbound, on a soft bed of grass. There was a biting, burning pain, lancing up his spine from the raw wound where his tail had been. His tail...

A hand slapped his face hard, and he shuddered, his guts twisting like a knot of writhing vipers, and he spat a burbling mouthful of clotted blood. The sun had moved round, dipping low in the west, since he had fallen. Or had someone struck him down? Memory rolled back over him and he sobbed weakly, trying to rise. A booted heel pushed him back down. He sank back, gasping. His blood was on fire, boiling inside his veins like lava pumping through a fissure in the earth, blistering his heart with each beat. He slowly focused on the face hovering over him.

"Jeiy---je---"

"Don't die yet, Vegita," Jeiyce grinned down at him.

"He's not even close to snuffing it," said another familiar voice. Zarbon. "Take care, my Lord. He looks bad off, but most of it's from the cannon and having the shit kicked out of him after we shot off his tail. He's still strong."

He was lying in the center of a growing legion of alien warriors and slaves, men and women of every description, every race. The gentle slope of the grass hilltop was one he knew well, a green range of ridges on the south edge of he Capital that looked across a forest valley gorge on the white gleaming walls of Med Center.

Bulma...

"He's already begun to bleed out, Zarbon," Jeiyce disagreed. "He won't be getting up again. Ever. His strength is a curse in this. He'll take a long time to die."

"We can't penetrate the shield with the cannons or Ki blasts, my Prince," a man shouted. "And if we send men closer than half a click the reactive field fries them!"

"Bitch," Jeiyce swore softly. "Get her on the vidcom."

"Bul..." Vegita moaned in a cracked whisper.

"She's just fine," Zarbon told him. "At the moment, she's being an obstinate pain in the ass!"

How long...how long since she had locked Med Center down...Oh gods, yes! Zarbon and his legions of invisible assassins had released the virus twenty days ago, but Med Center had been sealed off in quarantine for twenty-eight days! With nearly thirty thousand Saiyan children slumbering below, isolated and uninfected! Thirty thousand!

"It's not over until we break the seals and take care of every little monkey inside!" Someone shouted harshly. "They'll come back to haunt our grandchildren if we let them be, my Prince!"

"No one's walking away from an incomplete purge," Jeiyce said firmly. "If that spineless Namek hadn't ratted us out---"

"She's on the vid!" The tech's voice said.

"Knock-knock, lovey," Jeiyce said with soft menace. "Let us in or we'll blow this planet out from under you."

"We don't want to hurt you or your staff, Bulma," Zarbon said anxiously. "We just---"

"Want to come in and kill all the children," Bulma's voice was like a razor hewn from ice. "Fuck you both! Bang away at the shield until you all drop dead of old age. You don't have any weapons that can stand up to mine. The two of you should know that better than anyone."

"Bulma---" Zarbon's voice sounded strained, like a man being slowly ripped in half by divided loyalties.

"Don't Bulma me, you goddam baby killer!" she hissed. "Scopa's in Heaven right now cursing you for what you've done!"

"Scopa's in Heaven because of those vicious, murdering monsters whose brats your protecting!" Zarbon spat. "He was the best man, the kindest, most good soul either of us have even known and they repaid him for all his good deeds by tearing him to pieces! They---they---" The blue-skinned man stepped back from the vidcom and turned away, choking with hate and grief.

"Fine," Jeiyce said, with no outward sign of regret. "But we will have them, Lady. By hook or by crook." He shut the transmission off with a snap and glanced down at the tech at the small communication's field console. "Any word from our man on the inside? Is he even still alive?"

The tech grinned, pressing an old style, binary communications headphone to one ear. "He's not been able to take care of the kiddies, for some reason..." The mad paused, listening. "He's at the shield server right now....He says five minutes!"

Vegita squeezed his eyes shut against the increasing sense of...of fullness behind his eyes, a growing pressure that seemed to be feeding from the fever that was slowly ripping his body apart from the inside. He pushed the heat-soaked edge of his consciousness out, through the cords of the too-deep tie, the link that was something less than a moonbond, but far, far deeper it should have been.

Ve---Vegita? Faint and hesitant, but she was there.

Oh Kami...it's Hiru! The sense of her voice, strident and terrified. Bardock! Toma! Rikkuum! Vegita says Hiru's at the shield server! He---he's going to---!

A deafening shockwave blasted over the little army on the hillock as their ranged pulse cannons fired point blank on Med Center in unison.

"The shield is..." The tech checked his scanner. "He's done it! Hiru's fed it some kind of virus! It's weakening!"

No! Bulma's voice in his head. No...

"Blast 'em again, lads!" Jeiyce cried.

"Bulma..." Vegita croaked to the blue-skinned man standing above him. "Your friend?"

"Yes," Zarbon seemed to see Vegita for the first time, as the words jostled him out of his own dark tortured thoughts. "She was my friend. She's brave, good woman, and you made her a slave and a whore. She deserved a lot better than you, you bastard."

"...could say the same of...Scopa...He would have been...proud of you...killing children."

A boot slammed into his gut with bone-breaking force. "Don't you speak his name, you piece of shit! Don't you dare!"

Another thunderous boom, as the cannons fired again. "Don't kill him yet, Zarbon!" Jeiyce cried. "Not until he sees Med Center fall. Not until he and I are even!"

How bad is it, girl? Bardock's voice was saying.

I can stabilize it! But I need a few minutes...oh gods, just a couple more---

"Even..." Vegita locked one shaking fist around the Rashia-jin's ankle. "Bulma...and Romayn...Jeiyce means to kill them...payment for...deaths of his woman and son!"

The man's golden eyes flickered with doubt. "Bulma won't be harmed. And Rom-kun..." He stumbled over the boy's name. "I---I can't help him," he said sadly, "But Bulma---"

"Bulma," Jeiyce cut him off coldly. "Should have thought of the consequences before she turned traitor to the Red Network! Too bad for her. I'll grant no quarter to collaborators!" The assembled throng of rebels roared in agreement, a mob scenting blood, as another volley of shot rained upon the shield and it seemed to buckle this time.

"You said she'd be left alone!" Zarbon wheeled on him, suddenly nose to nose with his Prince, gripping the smaller man by his forearms. "You swore she would---"

The sounds of the two mens' escalating shouts and curses were being drowned inside a rhythmic thunder, ringing inside Vegita's ears, drumming inside his chest. It was his own heartbeat.

Oh gods, Vegita! A sense of maddened, furious effort. We're not going to make it! I need more time to fix what he's done! Oh God, oh Kami...they're going to kill all the children!

Vegita lay on his back, forgotten in the tussle between Jeiyce and Zarbon, in the furor of the men repriming their cannons for the blow that would shatter Med Center's shield like brittle glass.

When you have seen your woman dragged out by her hair and raped to death, Jeiyce had said. Your foster son taken by his heels and his brains dashed out...then you and I will be even! Not before!

Bulma, Romayn...his people, his worlds, his father, his---his everything!

"We will not be even!" Vegita whispered, his eyes wide and crimson, hitching shallow gasps of wet, labored breath. He smiled through fanged jaws at the red orb, rising over the hilltops to the east, drowning the image of everything else in the heavens. Fools...to have thought that taking his tail would matter, now that the moon had come!

His back arched in agony, his eyes stinging with his own blood, full of the moon, the red, glorious moon, that blotted out a full third of the night sky as it rose. A jolting wrench, as though his spine were being tore out through his backside...and his tail grew back.

He rose up like an erupting volcano, morphing into the razor-clawed, fanged beast of rut and Moontime, not Oozaru not yet wholly a man. He scattered the men around him in all directions, like dead leaves blown before the winds of an on-coming storm, wailing in an ear-shattering roar of loss and fury and grief. Something was tearing loose inside his chest, his guts, rupturing behind his eyes. It was crack in his self, deeper and more mortal than any depth Jeiyce's tortures had ever managed to plumb. He could feel something slipping loose from his grasp, something fracturing irreparably in his soul. Too many things lost in too short a time.

And he broke a second time in his life. Not in agony, not in despair, hovering inside a rising storm of power. Not for glory or for revenge...but because he simply could not lose. The last lesson of kingship, a weeping, bitter epiphany, and a truth Jeiyce and his men had somehow forgotten---that a man who fights for his own hate and vengeance will never be as strong as a man with something left to lose. A man protecting everything that matters to him in the universe. His entire being had caught fire, his blood, his body, his brain, bathing him in an amber flame of power, burning inside a golden nimbus that lit the deepening red skies of dusk bright as daybreak. He splintered the cannons surrounding the besieged fortress, feeling the fever in his body leap higher still, like the fires of a dying star, burning brightest just before it fails...

Super Saiyan... Bardock's hushed voice, echoing through the filter of Bulma's mind, full of awe and hope. He will save us in the hour of our greatest need...

Slashing and crushing weapons and flesh in a blinding blur of lightning quick strikes...they were no match for him. He could feel the ripping finality of something giving way terminally inside his head. Blood was flowing freely from---from everywhere, the sign of the virus taking him into its death cold arms at last.

That's it! Bulma was crying ecstatically. I did it! It's back online, it---oh gods, Vegita...Vegita!

The red night pressed in on him, pulling him down. As he spun downward, he propelled himself with one last burst of strength, to the best place, the only place on Vegita-sei, he wished to sleep in death.

He woke in dim light, fresh dew soaking his face and hair, morning mist clinging to the hills around his villa, threading through the trailing ivy and blood-hued Chikyuu-jin roses that lay around him, their sweet scent hanging thick in the cool morning air. The morning smelled of fall. The heat must have finally broken during the night. If he must die, there was no finer place to fall than this garden...

The soft pillow under his head shifted and warm lips touched his bloody mouth, blue silk hair brushing his face as she bent over him. He tried to speak, to ask her if she was a dream. He tried to move his mouth, but he could not. He was spent.

"The shield is in place," she answered softly, smiling sadly. "You did it, Vegita...you saved us. Your people will live on. Because of you." She laid her fingers over his lips as he fought to speak. "Shhh...I don't have much time. They...they scooped up a section of land under the rad shield generator and tossed the whole thing up into the inner shield barrier. The rad shield is gone, and Jeiyce's back-up will be here any hour now. Listen to me...Nail was Red Network, but when he learned about the virus he warned me. He said he wouldn't be party to the murder of innocents. We only learned about the plague bombs after they'd released the virus on every world in the Empire, but it was after I sealed up Med Center in cloister, so no one inside was exposed. I have a vaccine, Vegita. For all the children, for Bardock and his people, for Articha and Turna and all the girls on their ships if we can find them before they become exposed. But it will only work if you haven't already contracted it. It can't help you..." Her voice was measured and calm as she spoke...too calm. He suddenly knew that she was reliving the death of her homeworld even as she grieved for this world of enemies she had begun to call home. Those brilliant crystal blue eyes were dry and unblinking as she held him, sitting in the ruins of her flowers garden, as he fought against each stalling falter of his own heart to spare her what she would surely see if she stayed longer.

"I had to tell you," she said gently. I had to let you know..."

He pushed into the link a little further, and through the stunned swirl of her grief and sorrow for the death of the world that had made her a slave, he saw the entirety of everything that was her...and he saw the door, that door that had remained barred and bolted as he made her his, even while she opened her heart to him in every other way. But there was no barrier now. That door was swung wide...

It coalesced in his battered mind as he saw dozens of pieces of information weaving themselves together to tell him a secret that should have been no surprise. She had been the Red Network's hidden engineer. Jeiyce's Mastertech. It was she who had drawn up the plans and meticulous specs of construction for the capsules...for the invisibility shields...for the Ki-killers. She had run to the open arms of the Rebels during her first year as his slave, almost from the first day he had brought her to the Capital.

She had turned from the Red Network in horror, just as Ottousama guessed, when she saw firsthand the use Jeiyce was putting her inventions to. Her inventions were responsible for...oh gods, for billions of Saiyan deaths, responsible for his capture at the hands of the enemy, responsible for the army of spies who had moved about every Saiyan world, unseen, as they released the plague that---

Yes. Of course. And here, as he lay numbering his last breaths, he could not look away from the second truth he saw. His hands were as filthy with the blood of his people as hers. If not for his own deeds---the death of Raditz and the child, the months of that first summer when he had used her like an animal, breaking her body, crushing her spirit; if not for the year that had followed, when he had enjoyed her as a thing he possessed, pampering and abusing her as his childish, mercurial moods dictated---if not for him, she would never have wrought, unknowingly, the engines of his world's destruction. An entire empire felled in the space of a day. Dead by the hand of Jeiyce of Maiyosh...dead by the hand of Zarbon of Rashia-sei....dead by the hand of Bulma of Chikyuu....and dead by the hand of Vegita, Saiyan no Ouji.

"No..."

"Oh Kami..." She moaned. "I didn't mean for you to see that!" She shook her head slowly, brushing away the tears that had brimmed at his eyes. "It's not your fault! It's not! I did it! I was stupid and gullible. I didn't know what they would do with the things I made...and I trusted Zarbon. I only wanted the Rebels to be able to defend themselves...to be able to hide their families with the camo-shields." She sighed like a woman on the verge of tears, but still, she didn't weep. "I’ll save the children, Vegita. The shield bubble around Med Center can withstand even the quantum stresses of hyper light speed. I have two carrier engines built into the foundations, on the focal point of the shield. In one hour, I’m going to blast Med Center off and drive it like a ship to a new world. Somewhere no one will find us. I didn’t mean for my work to be used the way Jeiyce used it, Vegita. But I have cho-gugol to all of your people because of it. And I won’t let them down. But none of this is what I came to tell you."

He saw what she had come to tell him, cradled in her heart like the most precious thing in creation…which it surely was.

She stroked his face, feather light, her voice still gentle. "Do you really think I would let you kill another child of mine, Vegita?"

He shuddered in her arms, shifting weakly, trying to move, trying to ride out the force of the icy blast of hate, of betrayal, of screaming grief for the love she had felt for him. The love he had torn to bloody shreds the day she told him he had put her with child, along with a goodly portion of her sanity. The sweet, lilting song she had sung this morning, the lullaby dirge she had sung to her firstborn after he was dead, was echoing inside her head, a haunting anthem of quiet madness. She had stood strong and unbowed by all the long list of evils he had done her…and he had destroyed her, in the end, trying to save her.

"There’s always another option," she said softly, implacable as admantium steel. "I put him in an incu-pod and let you think I’d aborted him. I’ll tell him when he’s older how his father was brave and strong…how he died to save his people. He’s going to be beautiful, Vegita. All the good in you and me and none of the bad. I wanted you to know about him. I wanted you to know that something of you will go on. That it won’t be as though you never lived." Her blue eyes were chill and distant, like frozen waters lying beneath a glacier. Cold and incongruously full of love as she looked on him. Mad. She stroked his brow, smiling sweetly down at him.

"Your fever’s broken. The virus…if you’re strong enough, you can survive it. At a price. The cerebral swelling and hemorrhaging ruptures and destroys the centers of your brain where your power resides. Your Ki. If I gave you enough blood, you would survive…but you’d live the rest of your life powerless."

Was she offering him the chance to die with his world, with honor, as a warrior, rather than live on? King of a dead world. A Ki-less weakling…

"Bulma…" He whispered, raw and broken. "I will live…take me…" I will live. I do not care about---about--- His mind snagged on the very thought of living without Ki, a cripple and a weakling, but he ground his teeth. I learned late that the greatest measure of a King’s strength does not lie in his fighting power. Bear me to Med Center. I will live to lead my people. I will live to be yours, woman, if it can ever be made right again! Take me back…

He lay for a long time, slipping in and out of consciousness, watching the sun rise on the last day of his world, weeping softly. I will die now…I will die. There was nothing left to live for. Nothing at all.

* * * * *