Then his finger dropped.And hovered.
He let Command hear the hover. Power liked to be taught.
He tapped accept.
The secure panel drew itself into a neat rectangle of light and rank. A crisp voice arrived half a beat ahead of its face—low, clipped, trying not to be nervous around a title it needed to move like furniture.
"Your Highness. Command. Redeployment window opens in—"
"Closes," Vegeta said, "in one week."
A pause. Paper shuffled somewhere he refused to picture. "Respectfully—current tasking takes precedence. Outer sectors report—"
"Report to me later," Vegeta said. "You have my pod code. You'll use it when the gravity chamber is live."
"That is… research and development?" The voice smiled without the face changing. "We can requisition a test subject—"
"You could," Vegeta said. "You won't."
The panel hesitated as if offended. "Your Highness, the Emperor—"
"Will receive results," Vegeta said. "Not excuses and not a corpse you made because you couldn't wait six days."
Silence did what good silence does—moved things. When the voice returned, it wore a compromise like a bruise.
"Two days for initial data," it said. "Then we revisit."
"Six," Vegeta said.
"Four," the voice tried, because it wanted to feel like a soldier.
Vegeta watched the bay over the panel's edge—crates sliding, metal singing, the engineer cutting the drum shell with a blade that didn't apologize. Four is them thinking they won a hand. He let them have it. I'll take the table.
"Four," he said. "Ping my pod. Not one minute sooner."
"Understood, Your Highness."
The panel dimmed. The line died politely.
[SYSTEM: Stress markers elevated. Training baseline protocol available.]
He didn't sigh. He didn't blink like a man grateful for help. He let the prompt sit until it learned where it lived.
Later. When it earns the right to speak.
He turned back into Bay Three. The room had set its jaw. Two techs braced the shell half on a cradle while a third torqued a mount until it stopped arguing. The driver cores pulsed on their harness—dim, patient suns. Cables draped like intent.
"Prince," the clerk said, rabbit-steady. "Supply confirmed continuous flow. Quartermaster attached a—a personal note of enthusiasm."
"Fear," Nappa translated, dragging a coil the size of a man across the floor with cheerful contempt. "It's efficient."
The engineer glanced up long enough to clock that the room's worst distraction had ended. "We'll need your biometrics," she said. "Now. Lock and cutoff key to your body, not your title."
"Do it," Vegeta said.
She didn't ask for permission twice. A sensor cradle unfolded from a rack—plate, grips, a contact bar at shoulder height. No fanfare. No cushioned edges.
"Hand," she said. He laid it on the pad. The unit hummed, tasted him through the skin, muttered to itself in numbers. "Other hand." He gave it. "Tail base." He arched without embarrassment; the contact point clicked, found pulse, stored it. "Blood."
She held out a lancet like a secret. He pricked his finger—he didn't need her to do it—and let a bead fall into the receiver. The plate sang once, satisfied.
[SYSTEM: Biometrics calibrated. Hazard override requires host consent.]
"Eyes," she said. He met the lens. It blinked first.
"Voice," she said.
"Vegeta," he said, and the plate wrote authority down in a language it could keep.
"Good." She gestured at a square of metal set flush with the floor—thick, ugly, honest. "We can bring the field up under that." To the crew: "Power at one. Diagnostics only."
Nappa looked at the square as if it had challenged him to a race. "That thing wants a piece of you, Prince."
"Everything worth keeping does," Vegeta said, and stepped onto the plate.
The metal was cool through his boots. The room took one step back—the way rooms do when the wrong man stands in the right place.
"Field live," a tech called.
The first breath changed. Not much. Enough to notice that air had forgotten how light used to be.
"Point three over baseline," the engineer said, reading heatmaps. "Stable. Driver A is true, B at ninety-eight. Compensating."
Vegeta rolled his shoulders. Muscles acknowledged the fact of physics. Pain did what it was told. "Up."
"One point three to one point eight," she said. To the crew: "Bring it."
The plate pushed. The world didn't love him less; it loved him bluntly. His spine drew a line against it. The tail wanted to climb; he let it, just to remind the system where cats keep their balance.
"Two," he said.
The engineer's eyes moved, calculating not whether he could, but what it would cost the room if she let him. "Two," she agreed. "Hold for sixty. Watch driver temps."
The plate became a suggestion becoming a rule. Ankles, knees, hips—each joint reported in a voice that belonged to someone who didn't enjoy complaining and did it anyway. Sweat woke. He didn't wipe it.
"Breathing," Nappa said like a man narrating a parade. "Looks regular. Color's good."
"Good isn't the point," Vegeta said. "Up."
The engineer set her jaw. "Two-point-five for thirty seconds. Then we adjust mounts or we scrape you off the plate."
"Then you adjust fast," he said.
She nodded to the tech on the driver harness. "Two-point-five."
Heat came up through the boots, a slow argument turning into an interesting fight. The human part of him—the part the body insisted on having—made its case about orthopedics and caution. The Saiyan part made a better one. Hold.
[SYSTEM: Advisory—gravitational load exceeds acclimation profile. Recommend—]
"No," he said aloud, to the room. The System understood just fine.
"Ten seconds," the engineer said. "Nine."
Nappa's hands had curled into fists he didn't intend to make. He let them go, slow. "Looks like it likes you."
"It doesn't have to," Vegeta said.
Twenty-five seconds—thirty. The world narrowed to a rightness he could use. Nothing extra. Weight made liars honest.
"Mounts are singing," a tech warned, eyes on a graph trying to squeeze out from under a red line. "Driver B temp climbing."
"Plate flex within tolerance," the engineer said. Her voice didn't climb. It never did. "Time."
Vegeta stepped off like he'd decided to move cities, not feet. The world tried to remember lightness. He didn't let it. He kept the new value of air.
"Again," he said.
"We adjust first." The engineer pointed with the stylus to two mounts and a brace. "Shift loads. If the plate bows, you become a story."
Nappa grabbed the brace and set it where she tapped. The techs learned that no one died when they worked fast; they worked faster.
"Why no rest," Nappa asked, not whispering, "when you can?"
"Rest is a lie you sell your fear," Vegeta said. "Again."
The engineer wiped a note off her palm with the side of her hand and rewrote it better. "We can bring it up to two again to confirm the fix."
"Three," Vegeta said.
"No." It was the first time she'd used that word to him. Not rebellion. Engineering. "You jump load without confirming, we chase ghosts for an hour. Again at two."
He considered the line she'd drawn—looked at it the way he looked at men before he broke them. Then he took the step back onto the plate.
"Two," he agreed.
They brought it up cleaner. The room made less noise about it. He held for sixty. Nothing moved that wasn't his to move.
"Three," he said at the end of it, eyes on the harness. "Now."
The engineer weighed this man against this room and the job he'd handed her. "Fifteen seconds," she said. "If anything redlines, I cut the field and you don't complain about it later. That's the price."
"Do it," Vegeta said.
"Three," she said to the harness.
The plate turned into a truth you couldn't argue. His bones told old stories about other planets and didn't get to finish them. Muscles negotiated with gravity like professionals; tendons wrote terse notes. The skin tried to sweat more and discovered math. Breath became a metronome with no spare beats.
Nappa had the good sense to shut up.
[SYSTEM: Hazard threshold crossed. Muscle microtear rate—]
He locked the prompt in a corner and used it as a wall to lean thought against. Hold. Don't count. This is what the dial is for.
"Ten seconds," the engineer called. The graph decided it was a lake and flattened. Driver B's temp flirted and then thought better of it.
"Fifteen," she said. "Cutting."
The weight left clean, like ocean pulling off rock. He stayed very still until the world finished remembering itself.
Nappa exhaled first, because someone had to. "Prince, that was—"
"Baseline," Vegeta said. He stepped down and the earth tried to tell him it was kind. He refused kindness that hadn't been earned. "We keep it. We don't worship it."
The engineer checked the brace with two light taps that your average soldier would mistake for ritual. "You'll feel that in an hour," she said, without sympathy but with accuracy.
"I'm feeling it now," he said. "Good. Up again."
She slid him a look that measured risk, ambition, and the ductility of steel. "You want three-point-five today, you sign the waiver that says you told me to be stupid."
"I told you to be efficient," he said.
"Sometimes they rhyme," she said. She didn't smile. "I'll take you to three-point-two for ten. That's as far as the mounts go without a refit."
He took the plate again.
A runner shouldered through the door with a crate half his height and the face of a man who had learned to hold onto it. "Cutoffs," he panted. "From supply."
"On the wall," the engineer said without turning. She met Vegeta's eyes for exactly the time it takes to load trust. "Three-point-two. When I say cut, you step off. If you hesitate, the system takes your legs for you."
"Then it learns fast," he said.
"Three-point-two," she told the harness.
The plate introduced him to an older brother he'd never met—the kind that doesn't beat you because it hates you but because you have to be interesting to live here. His vision narrowed to honest edges. The bay reduced to lines that mattered.
The first second—noise. The fifth—music. At nine, the mounts found their complaint and held it like a note.
"Cut," the engineer said.
He didn't. He held for one extra beat, because pride is a currency and you spend it to tell the universe what year it is.
Then he stepped off.
The room—those who had been pretending not to watch—watched him turn around like a man walking through weather. He felt the tremble he refused. He allowed the subtle shift of balance his tail corrected without asking.
"Again," he said.
The engineer wiped her palm clean again and read new numbers off skin. "We adjust the brace before we leap again. You want more, we make 'more' hold."
Nappa's grin had softened into something like respect and something like worry that didn't dare say its name. "They're going to love your report."
"They'll get numbers," Vegeta said. "Not feelings."
The clerk hovered at the doorjamb, a hand to his ear as if that would make the information behave. "Your Highness," he said, too careful. "Command logged our—your—timeline. They scheduled a follow-up in ninety-six hours. There's a… polite note asking you not to die."
"Tell them to bring better notes," Vegeta said.
He stepped onto the plate before anyone could put cushion in the space around his name.
[SYSTEM: Training baseline recorded. New protocol unlocked: 'Pressure Sets.']
He didn't look at the words. He felt them. He felt the exact promise he'd come here to steal.
"Three-point-two," he said, and then, before the engineer could agree to her own limit: "Three-point-five."
"Vegeta," she said, using his name like a tool. "Three-point-two holds. Three-point-five is where metal sings in keys I don't like."
"Make it learn the song," he said.
She stared at him for a count that felt like two fights he might enjoy later. Then she nodded once—a concession to inevitability, not to him.
"Three-point-five," she told the harness. To him: "You feel anything you don't recognize, you say the word 'out.' I don't care how proud you are."
He answered with the smallest possible nod that counted.
The plate woke into pain on purpose. The kind that built instead of breaking—if you told it who owned it. His knees reported. His hips testified. His spine claimed jurisdiction. Breath went to work.
Red lights flickered on the edge of vision—the useful kind, not the melodramatic. A brace creaked like an oath.
"Five seconds," the engineer said, voice flat. "Seven."
Nappa's knuckles were white on the edge of a crate he could have lifted with one hand any other day.
"Ten," the engineer said. "Eleven."
[SYSTEM: Hazard—mount resonance at 3.5g detected. Recommend—]
"More," Vegeta said, and the harness heard him first. The band bit down. The bay's hum jumped a key. Metal told the truth.
The engineer swore once, short, in a language made of bolts and maps. "Hold him," she snapped to the techs, which didn't mean hands—it meant minds. "We're at the edge."
Vegeta didn't blink. Edges were where air turned thin and honest.
"More," he said again. And the field answered like it had been waiting to be spoken to properly.