Chapter 77
Bardock was hauling Raditz by the wrist through the dim corridor, his scouter casting a dull green glow against the metal walls. Kakarot wobbled behind them, barely keeping up on stubby legs, his own tiny scouter blinking erratically.
The ship's alarms had stopped screaming minutes ago. That was worse, somehow. The silence felt like a fist tightening around my ribs.
Mother adjusted her grip again, her breath sharp against my ear. "If we miss that pod, we're all dead." She didn't say it like a threat. Just a fact.
A sudden tremor rocked the corridor, sending Kakarot sprawling face-first into the grated floor. Bardock's grip on Raditz didn't slacken, but his knuckles turned bone-white under his gloves. The overhead pipes groaned like dying beasts, spraying steam that stank of burnt metal and something far more organic.
My tiny fists tangled in Mother's hair as she broke into a sprint, boots hammering against the vibrating floor. Past her shoulder, I caught flashes of emergency lights casting the hallway in pulsing red—like the inside of a predator's throat. Raditz twisted to look back at us, his pupils blown wide with terror rather than battle-lust for
once.
A metallic shriek tore through the ship from somewhere deep below, followed by the unmistakable sound of structural supports giving way. Mother's curse was lost in the cacophony, but I felt her arms tense like coiled springs. The escape pod bay doors loomed ahead, already halfway through their emergency closure sequence
.
Bardock moved first—tossing Raditz through the narrowing gap with a snarl. Kakarot scrambled after on all fours, wailing. Mother's next step faltered as the floor tilted violently beneath us. I'll never forget the exact texture of her fingernails biting into my thigh as she threw me forward, nor the wet crunch when the closing doors severed her reaching hand at the wrist.
The pod shuddered under us as the bay decompressed, Bardock's boot wedged against the control panel to keep the hatch sealed. Through the viewing port, Mother's mouth formed words I couldn't hear—not that it mattered. The entire corridor behind her collapsed like a dying lung, swallowing her silhouette in a storm of twisted metal and arterial
spray.
Raditz screamed something incoherent, but the sound cut off when Bardock backhanded him across the mouth. "Strap in," he growled, blood flecking his teeth from where he'd bitten through his own tongue. Kakarot's wails turned to choked hiccups as the pod's thrusters ignited, crushing us into our seats.
Outside, the planet cracked open like an egg. I watched Vegeta's death throes through the port—not with sorrow, but with the detached fascination of a child watching ants drown in syrup. Something warm trickled down my chin. I'd bitten clean through my own lip.
Bardock's hands danced across the console with brutal precision, his scouter projecting a holographic map of escape vectors. "Freiza's fleet," he spat, highlighting a swarm of red dots converging above the dying world. The pod's engines whined as he wrenched us into a spiraling dive straight through the debris field of shattered ships.
Raditz whimpered when the first laser barrage seared past our hull, the heat warping the metal inches from his face. Kakarot just giggled, tiny fingers smearing the port with his own bloody snot as he pointed at the explosions. I remember thinking his laughter sounded exactly like Mother's choking gasps before the corridor ate her.
The pod's AI screamed a collision warning as we clipped the wing of a battleship—Bardock's grin was all teeth when the impact sent us careening into Frieza's flagship's blind spot. His boot crunched down on the emergency thrusters, and suddenly we were falling faster than Vegeta's corpse.
Kakarot's giggles turned to shrieks as the G-forces crushed us into our seats. I could feel my own ribs bending, tasted copper as my vision tunneled—but Bardock never eased up. Through the blur, I saw Raditz's face turn purple, his mouth gaping like a fish as his scouter cracked under the pressure.
The hull glowed white-hot when we punched through the atmosphere, the stench of burning circuits mixing with the wet reek of Raditz pissing himself. Somewhere in the maelstrom, Bardock was laughing, actually laughing, as Frieza's orbital cannons lit up the sky behind us like a funeral pyre.
Then blackness. Not the clean dark of space—this was the thick, suffocating void of a Saiyan's rage. When consciousness returned, it was to the sound of Kakarot chewing on a severed power cable, his eyes reflecting the amber emergency lights like a feral thing. Outside the cracked viewport, an unfamiliar planet's rings glittered coldly. Alive. For now.
Bardock pried himself from the pilot's chair with a wet pop of healing ribs, his scouter's cracked display still projecting Frieza's sigil—now slashed through with coordinates to a backwater mudball called Earth. Raditz stirred in his harness, vomiting onto his own lap. The stench summoned a memory of Mother's blood pooling across steel grating.
The escape pod's computer blared a damage report—life support at 12%, engines dead, hull integrity failing. Bardock silenced it with a fist through the console. The silence afterward was worse. Not the absence of sound, but the absence of her. Even Kakarot stopped gnawing, sensing the shift in the air like a storm's static charge.
Bardock turned to us then, eyes reflecting the dying planet behind him through the viewport. He didn't speak. Didn't need to. That look—half-mad, wholly unforgiving—was the last thing Vegeta ever gave us. Then he kicked the hatch release, letting in the screaming wind of a world that didn't yet know it was doomed.