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 need