"...There it is."
After the satellite had been destroyed, Zeck and I had absolutely zero desire to rebuild it by hand. Building it once had been irritating enough. We weren't going through that again, no matter what Zeck's dad wanted.
As a result, Zeck, Lynn, Pepper, Tommy, and I had taken a little trip over to East City, earning a little money from odd jobs, street tournaments, and scamming con-artists, then we'd bought around 70 or so capsulized robotic assistants developed by Capsule Corp.
They'd rebuilt the satellite in under a day, leaving me to work on my other projects while I wasn't training.
As such, Goku's space pod was now sitting right outside the window to my study, various wires and cords snaking from it to my terminal as I studied the data that it'd recorded during its flight.
People under-rated just how much data a spaceship required to plot its course and micro-adjust during the flight.
But I was focused on one particular series of data, from less than twenty minutes after the pod's launch.
The pod had picked up on a big ki signature. Over 20,000. Then, a bigger one. One that completely dwarfed the former, with a number that hovered around 500,000 or so. Then, there'd been a large shockwave that'd nearly destabilized the pod's path, forcing a series of micro-adjustments. According to the system, the origin of the shockwave was a planetary-sized explosion from the same galactic coordinates as the pod's launch.
In other words, the pod had catalogued Bardock's struggle against Frieza, failure, and Planet Vegeta's subsequent explosion. My father, the triplets' mother, and Pepper's parents were all officially confirmed dead.
And to be honest, I felt nothing but relief. I'd expected a sense of loss, or something… but no. Nothing but relief.
Still, though. I had to tell my team. They deserved to know.
I gathered them all in my study to show them the data. The response from Tommy, Lynn, and Pepper were pretty much what I'd expected, not a word. Just confused, overwhelmed silence as they remembered their own mixed experiences on that trash pit of a planet.
Actually, from what I'd heard, all of the experiences we'd collectively had on that trash pit were negative, abuse after abuse, culminating in a thinly-concealed attempt at our murders during our first actual 'mission.'
But Tater's reaction caught me by surprise.
"...You knew. This entire time, you knew."
We all looked at Tater, but I didn't respond to him.
My entire team had long ago accepted the fact that I had extra knowledge in my head. They didn't question it anymore. To them, it was just a fact of life that I didn't like to talk about it, but they all knew about it.
"From the moment you came out of your damn incubation chamber, you knew that this would happen… You let our entire planet die!" Tater accused me, shouting.
"...Yeah. I did." I finally replied after a moment with a nod.
"..You could've saved them. Defeated Frieza long before this ever happened." I wasn't sure if Tater was asking me, or trying to tell me.
Either way, the answer was the same. "Yeah. I could've."
If, the exact moment that we'd arrived on Earth, I'd made my way to the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, I could probably have fully mastered Super Saiyan Primal long ago. Doing that, I would've probably been about twice as strong as I was now, maybe. Hopefully.
Even with that, I probably wouldn't have quite been Frieza's match, but a quick, generic wish to the Dragon Balls to strengthen me, like Piccolo did during the Dragon Ball Super: Super Hero movie, and the chances were pretty high that I'd have at least been able to match the tyrant. Probably even beaten his final form, actually. Maybe.
Then, I could've used a Celatian spaceship to get to Planet Vegeta before Frieza ever tried to destroy it. But, in the end, I'd made the conscious choice to let the Saiyans die. That was on me, and I wasn't going to pretend otherwise.
Quite frankly, I didn't think that the Saiyans of Vegeta deserved to survive. I didn't want to protect them.
I simply couldn't imagine an entire planet full of savage bastards giving up their ways and becoming anything more than what they were. So, I'd allowed them to die. I didn't regret it. They'd gotten what they deserved. The rest of the team, on some subconscious level, agreed with me.
But Tater looked at me like I was the worst, weakest coward that he'd ever met. "I looked up to you, Tarble." He turned on his heel, "I thought you were strong. But you're just a fake. A coward, who pretends to be stronger, smarter than everyone else!"
"Tater…!" Lynn exclaimed, but Tater wasn't listening anymore.
"If you're not a coward, if you're really strong, Tarble, you'll fight me. You'll beat me to a pulp, kill me, for challenging you, and like a real Saiyan, you won't hesitate. But I don't think you can." Tater challenged me, walking out the door and slamming it behind him without another word.
"...Tater…"