Dragon Ball/Z/GT Fan Fiction ❯ Ransom Due ❯ Pit Stop... ( Chapter 3 )

A/N: belated but much needed disclaimer: I don't own DBZ or most of the characters contained herein. Just giving a couple underrated ones 15 minutes. Thanks to Akira Toriyama for writing the original Dragonball.

 

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Ransom Due: Chapter 3: Pit Stop in a Star's Orbit

 

Lunch regarded the now smiling Tenshinhan with relief. It seemed like she'd been waiting for an awful long time to get out and be in control. She realized suddenly that maybe she shouldn't be so relieved to see Ten. She was assaulted by a sudden wave of guilt for what had gone on earlier at the Antiquities Museum. She was only aware of a few moments of what had actually happened. She hadn't yet become skilled enough at watching `the other' to grasp more than short flashbacks, but she'd seen enough to know that it was entirely possible that Ten had found her for the express purpose of hauling her off to jail… or worse, and she knew she deserved it.

 

“My goodness, a little stuffy in here, huh?” she asked, feigning a bright smile while she tried to shake off the feeling of being sick with herself. Then the realization dawned on her that she did have a bag with her that contained an item she would probably have been afraid to look at for too long, let alone steal it from a public museum. Perhaps there had been no other way to get it. The statue was intensely guarded due to rampant superstition about the late Piccolo Daimao, and the guards undoubtedly had been instructed to use deadly force if necessary during such a robbery. She unconsciously reached over and put her hand on the leather bag, while reaching into a pocket in the denim vest she was wearing to retrieve a handkerchief. She momentarily wondered where `the other' had gotten the clothes to change into, and where she'd left the stolen armor she last remembered wearing. She could feel another sneeze coming on even though she'd dropped the ragweed flowers when she'd sneezed the first time. `Oh, no, not now you don't,' she thought. She forced out a giggle and another grin. “What brings you to this old dump?” she managed to ask Ten, and batted her eyelashes a couple of times for good measure.

 

“Well, I heard that you've had quite a `vacation' from us these last few years. Kuririn mentioned some of the guys getting together over at Kame house, and I thought maybe you'd want to come along and tell us about what you've been up to.” He smiled broadly this time, and she could have sworn all three eyes had a mischievous, yet seldom seen, twinkle in them.

 

It had slipped her mind that as far as anyone on earth knew she wasn't conscious of what went on while `the other' was in control. It was still obvious that he was telling a half-truth, she didn't remember anything about being at Kame House earlier, but she knew she'd landed the stolen space pod as close to the island as she possibly could. She looked him over. The past few years of peace had treated him well. He had chosen to wear the same wide collared tunic that he'd worn to the last Tenka'ichi Budokai she had the pleasure of attending. Undoubtedly he was wearing his usual fighting gi underneath it, but it was still somewhat flattering that he had dressed up a little just to come out to catch up with her. He was still handsome as all get out, too, but this didn't strike her in the same way it always used to. It had been a long time, and too much had changed. Plus, she couldn't shake the feeling that she was talking to a dead man. Perhaps those people at the museum had just gotten an early admission to the afterlife, anyway. She knew that it was going to take little short of a miracle for her old friends to beat Raditzu, and after that, somebody stronger would just pick up where he left off.

 

“I'm sorry, Ten. I can't go to Kame House with you right now,” she said. “I have a very important appointment to keep as a matter of fact.” She wondered briefly if `the other' had left the scouter wherever the armor had been deposited. Unfortunately, she had no idea where that might be. She drew the leather bag into her lap. Ten looked at her questioningly as she opened it slightly and peered in. Only the jade statue was contained therein. “Actually, maybe you could help me?” She flashed him another bright smile despite another wave of guilt for involving him in such a plan.

 

“I see no harm in helping an old friend,” he replied.

 

“Even if it sounds crazy?”

 

He looked at her questioningly, and then cracked a little half grin. “It's been a while, but I'm still apt to expect `crazy' when it comes to you. What exactly do you require help with?”

 

“You can sense unusually high kis, right? I just need you to locate Ma Jr. and take me to him, that's all.”

 

All three eyes widened dramatically. “What?!”

 

--

 

Raditzu was a little over half the distance to Chikyuu when he was jolted out of stasis. The warp engines on the pod had failed and the alternate systems had automatically taken the craft into orbit around the nearest star and opened solar panels to recharge them. He irritably peered out the porthole, cursing Kakarott again for having sent him the errant slave. He noted several pockmarks in the padding that covered the interior of the pod, obviously caused by some hopelessly primitive projectile weapon. The slave had damaged the pod long before it had ever reached the asteroid field that was once Vegetasei. A routine patrol had come upon the drifting pod that had taken itself `home' on autopilot. Because the computer logs indicated that the pod belonged to a `son of Bardock, third class Saiya-jin Commander,' and the patrol was either too stupid or lazy to figure out the `Kakarott' part in the logs, they dropped the pod and its contents off on Missionary.

 

The thing was nothing but trouble from the start. Freiza ended up killing the entire patrol because they never even bothered to report finding the pod. When he found out about it, he'd demanded that Raditzu send the logs, so it wasn't long before he knew that there was yet another Saiya-jin somewhere in the universe. He had allowed Raditzu to keep the slave and added Chikyuu to the Missionary's roster of planets to sweep, on the condition that Raditzu would get more information about his `long lost little brother' out of the slave. He made a point over the fact that Saiya-jins were not known for taking prisoners, that the whole situation was `highly irregular,' and that he expected it to be handled with the discrepancy of an enlisted officer.

 

The slave, a dark haired female humanoid of petite build, claimed she had no memory as to how she got into the pod. Her explanation for that had been something he didn't quite understand about changing personalities. He had never heard of such a thing, as well traveled as he was. For her part she said she'd never heard of Kakarott, and that Chikyuu was still full of living people. He suspected that all or at least part of what she had told him was lies. He intensified his interrogation with threats of violence, but it never even got interesting, partly because the thing was obviously so terrified it would say anything he pressed it to, partly because any physical threat he could come up with would result in its expiration and render it useless for information. The thing looked like it would kill over if he so much as put his hands on it. Not that that stopped him from doing so. He'd resorted to picking the thing up by its ankle and carefully shaking it. He ended up getting two separate stories besides the first one before he decided he'd better quit before the thing broke. It was swearing through tears and screams at this point that his brother had figured to let him know he was alive by sending it because he thought he might be in need of a cook. He was actually amused a bit by the last part as he hadn't bothered having much of what he ate cooked in a long time, simply out of convenience. He went ahead and assigned the slave to the ship's galley, figuring that he'd eventually make sense out of what had happened to his brother and the planet he was supposed to have purged.

 

Although Freiza had added the Chikyuu mission to the ship's roster, it still wasn't of enough import to the tyrant for it to be high in priority by any means. By its position on the roster, it would be quite awhile before Missionary was even in that sector of space. He had plenty of time to figure out just what to do with the delicate slave.

 

For the first while, he could have almost been pleased that he had ended up with the slave. It turned out that she was a very good cook, if one could disregard the fact that at least half of what she made would have poisoned a being with a lesser constitution. He found himself eating more, if that was possible. Eventually Daax ordered that the slave cook his meals as well. The slave was compliant and obedient, even surprisingly pleasant at times despite the fact that he treated it as unsympathetically as possible. In the beginning, because of the suspicious nature of his procurement of the slave, he had wanted to keep an eye on it. He'd given it a space on the floor in the corner of his barracks to sleep in, but having to keep the gravity so low in his room was an annoyance he wasn't going to deal with in the long run. Artificial gravity sucked in his opinion, anyway. It wasn't long before he gave it one of the small compartments on the lower decks of the ship known as coffins. These were niches that offered only enough space for one to lie down in, hence the name. Most of the enlisted troops, indentured servants and slaves all of them, slept in such quarters.

 

The slave had also come in handy for taking care of the tedious tasks that went along with being sub-commander of a ship of Missionary's size, necessary paperwork and the like. It gave him an awful lot more time for training, which he figured was never wasted time. He had more sparring sessions with Captain Daax during this time than his whole tenure on Missionary. Granted, he ended up in the regen chamber twice as much as before, but this had only served to make him stronger. It was when he got out of regen on one occasion that the next headache associated with the slave became evident. By that point, the slave had been taking care of many of his domestic needs, including bringing him a fresh set of armor and a clean undamaged uniform when he awakened from regen. This time, the slave arrived as usual, and was handing him clean things to wear when one of the bracers that were a part of the armor he wore dropped to the floor and slid under the bench he was sitting on. The slave went to pick it up, apologizing profusely as she did so. She had her head all the way under the bench looking for it and was in mid sentence when she sneezed loudly. When she came up from under the bench, he was surprised to see that she had undertaken a transformation, but he didn't have much time to think about it. Even he was taken aback at the speed with which the slave positioned herself in what he would later realize was the best place to have the strategic upper hand in the sparse room. She still faced him, but was close enough to the exit port that she would have had a chance to take off unhindered on Missionary's mid decks, had he been of a race as weak as her, anyway.

 

“Where the fuck am I, and who in the hell are you?” the slave had growled. He'd have laughed at the juxtaposition of the harsh voice coming from a being he had become accustomed to as docile, but he didn't even get that far before he was pelted with a barrage of ineffective, stinging projectiles. Somehow, the now blonde slave had managed to sneak one of her primitive weapons aboard his ship, and she dared to discharge the thing in his direction. He shook quite a quantity of lead bullets from his hair and dropped the handful he had managed to catch. The slave's features registered alarm for a split second before she made for the door. He was much faster than she could fathom, and had blocked her escape before she had gotten halfway down the short corridor. He efficiently put her into a painful chokehold that he hoped would not result in a broken neck.

 

“Are you finished?” he'd asked menacingly. The slave had hardly stopped for a breath between her curses, and continued to struggle and kick at him despite his obvious physical advantage. He dragged it to its coffin and deposited it there, locking the portal. He was going to have to reassess his handling of the slave.

 

The transformation had surprised him. He had reviewed the information the planet trade had on Chikyuu, and none of it indicated that the population was capable of transformation. He had also double-checked the slave's stats with his scouter, and it had gained almost twenty points to its power level with the transformation. It was still negligible in terms of his own strength, but the oversight was definitely worth noting. Now the slave's explanation of having no memory of how she'd gotten into Kakarott's space pod made some sense, at least. Lower level Saiya-jins without the proper training were known to suffer memory loss during the Ozaru transformation. No doubt this was a similar occurrence. He surmised that he might get some useful information if he resumed interrogations.

 

His captain, on the other hand, had other ideas. Ever the pragmatist, Daax had become aware of the `incident' in the regen banks, and had begun to calculate what he, as senior officer, could perhaps gain from the turn of events. The captain was always looking for some way to make Missionary look better in terms of the trade's primary mission. He was constantly obsessed with the statistics of planets cleared by crew from Missionary as they measured up to other units working for House Freiza. Missionary always had to be at least in the top five performers or Daax would sack the whole crew, minus high ranking officers specifically assigned by Freiza - which meant everybody on board except Raditzu. Missionary may not have always been in the top five as far as planets purged, but was consistently in that league when it came to the attrition rate of the crew. Raditzu had often wondered if this was a quirk attributed to Daax's race. He was of the same race as Dodoria, and looked very much like Freiza's errand boy. As strong a fighter as Daax was, Raditzu was under the impression that he'd rather be sitting on the bridge of Missionary reviewing `the numbers,' or hanging around other members of House Freiza's court and gloating about the stats, than getting out into a good fight.

 

It had only been a couple of hours since the incident, and Daax had caught up with Raditzu on one on the training decks. Raditzu had been doing some katas to try and clear his mid some so that he could figure out an efficient way to interrogate the slave without killing it. His gut reaction was to simply dispatch the thing, but for some reason the fact that his little brother might have been alive had been nagging at him. Under other circumstances, this wouldn't have made much difference to him one way or the other, but now he was only one of three, and he wasn't exactly on great terms with the other two. Daax interrupted and asked him if he wanted to spar a bit. He should have known that it was only an excuse to weasel his way into a discussion about crew performance.

 

Daax started by coming at him fast and popping off successive jabs, all of which Raditzu either dodged or blocked, whereupon he responded with a volley punches and kicks. He found sparring with Daax especially frustrating because the man was simply such a large target that there always seemed to be somewhere he was leaving wide open to attack, but he was so powerful that most of the blows that landed did little if any damage. Raditzu noticed one of these openings and swung a powerful uppercut to Daax's chin. The punch connected, sending the large pink head back with its momentum, when suddenly Raditzu found his legs kicked out from under him. He landed hard on his back. Daax offered his hand to help him up, which of course he immediately slapped away and then kicked out as he rose back to a standing position, sending the captain careening across the room.

 

“Heard you had some troubles today.” Daax commented as he came at Raditzu again, this time appearing behind the Saiya-jin and punching at his ribs. He landed one well-placed blow but Raditzu was able to grab his wrist and pull him around to where he could land another punch to the captain's jaw.

 

“You could say that.”

 

The captain took a step back rubbing his jaw in mock annoyance. In the same motion he extended his hand to fire off a ki blast at his opponent. “Heard your charge had enough moxie to discharge a weapon at you.”

 

Raditzu stepped to the side of the ki blast and smacked it back at his attacker, following up right behind it with a blast of his own. “And I suppose you think that amusing?”

 

Daax blocked both energy blasts in a blistering explosion, returning to his stance as the smoke cleared. “Actually we could use someone like that on the front lines occasionally. Most of these mooks don't have quite the death wish they used to. I'm interested to see if it can perform low level purging duties. I like soldiers who shoot first and ask questions later, and right now our numbers are down because of the near failure by the low class grunts to purge planet Rajt.”

 

By now Raditzu had let his aura flare out. Daax took this as a signal to initiate another attack. He rushed the Saiya-jin again and the two became locked in a high-speed exchange of punches and kicks. “I told you that planet Rajt should have been left to me. What the hell are you suggesting, anyway?” Raditzu asked between blocking a parrying, “that we put my domestic slave in with the enlisted?”

 

One of Daax's punches got through his defenses, sending him flying backward, but he righted himself and flew upward, slinging another blast of ki energy at the captain as he went.

 

Daax sent a blast to meet it, and the two energy balls collided with a bang. The two struggled for control of the mass of energy, but eventually Raditzu was overcome by the other man's sheer strength. He quickly strafed in midair, the blast just barely grazing him before exploding on the shielded wall of the training deck.

 

“Why not?” Daax yelled up to him. “I figure that'll solve one of your problems. Think of it this way. Most of those guys are lucky to make it back from their first mission. It'll probably get itself killed, and you can wash your hands of the matter. You're going to end up on that backwater your brother went to anyway. Freiza asks any questions and you can claim you were just following orders.”

 

“Heh. Like that'll make a difference if he really has it out for me,” Raditzu yelled back as he checked his tail was wrapped securely around his waist so that the beefy captain wouldn't be able to get his hands on it. Then he flew at his opponent. Daax prepared to block a punch, but Raditzu surprised him by getting him into a grapple hold and forcing him to the opposite wall of the deck. “You just know all this sparring is making me stronger and you're starting to feel threatened.”

 

Daax jabbed his elbow into the rib he'd punched previously and used the leverage of his weight to grind it in and get the upper hand on the Saiya-jin. He pinned Raditzu to the floor. “Hardly. Just thought it might be interesting. Tell you what. Squad 57 is training in weaponry two decks down right now. Let's take it down there and see how it performs. Just for laughs. Or I could send you to the regen chamber and we'll forget all about it.”

 

Raditzu finally conceded to Daax's idea because now that the slave was grounded anyway, he would have to catch up on some ships logs. Now he didn't have time for another few hours in regen.