by DoraMouse
Part Two: 739 A.D.
It was a cold, narrow room. Barely wide enough for two people to stand beside each other. The floor, ceiling and metallic walls were all dark gray, the edges of each wall outlined by the round tops of the thick steel bolts that held the room together. Seven narrow beds were in the room - three mounted on left wall, three mounted on the right wall and one on the wall that faced the doorway. The vertical mattresses were thin, in most cases the wall behind the bed was visible through the patches of worn padding. The ceiling supported a single light fixture and two wide square air vents. The walls had several smaller rectangular vents around each bed.
The beds each held one warrior that was currently in an induced state of deep sleep.
It was a hibernation room - clean, cold and devoid of any decoration. The simple fact of the matter was that Freezia was a businessman. He sold planets with the intention of coming out ahead. The less money and effort he had to invest in a venture, the easier it would be for him to make a profit. So corners were cut here and there to make things more affordable, more profitable. The spaceships weren't always made of the best material, the pilots and doctors aboard the spaceships had very limited training and the low-class soldiers were always strapped into the vertical beds and put to sleep for long trips.
Cruel as it seemed, there were numerous reasons Freezia had ordered that it be done. The spacecrafts were cheaper to make - as well as lighter weight and more fuel efficient - if they didn't have to have enough bedrooms to accomidate a whole army. The ship didn't have to provide food or entertainment for the sleeping soldiers between raids. The soldiers themselves remained more focused. The induced hibernation meant that the warriors were never really given a chance to rebel against the empire or get distracted by a social life. Plus putting the warriors to sleep meant that there was ample opportunity to search the lockers where each soldier kept their handful of personal belongings. Anything either valuable or dangerous would be taken away from them.
Toy soldiers, that's how Freezia sometimes refered to the the bulk of his army because that's precisely how the warriors were being treated. A spaceship would land on a target planet, the soldiers would be brought out for the battle and after it was done with any surviving warriors would be stacked neatly back into the high-tech equivalent of a toy box. The soldiers received no privacy, no social life and no wages. The only things that Freezias Army truly gave the low class fighters were a uniform and the chance to vent their anger by conquering alien worlds.
Of course, it was a whole different story for the higher ranked warriors. They weren't as expendable. Freezia actually seemed to value them.
With an echoing thud the room slanted. The ship had impacted the ground at an awkward angle but this was quickly corrected. Once the ship had stablized, the engines noise faded to a whirr and all the vents in the room creaked open. Two large square vents in the ceiling had fans whose blades began to rotate with increasing speed in an attempt to rid the small room of the various odors that clung to it - mold, old dust and rotting fabric. The smaller, rectangular vents that were in the walls exhaled a warm breeze and the pleasant smell of fresh-baked sweetbread.
That last part was pure psychology. Experiments had found that food smells were among the most effective when it came time to wake the warriors up. Freezia prided himself on knowing these sorts of trivial things. Psychology was an interest of Freezias, if only because it made him better able to deal with the types of customers that bought planets from him.
Six of the seven warriors in the room came to life slowly and in silence. There was nothing worth saying at this point. They didn't even look at each other, each soldier bowing their head as if ashamed to be seen this way. They preoccupied themselves with the task of unhooking all the various straps that held them in place against their mattresses mounted on the wall.
Raditz was the first to step down onto the floor, he closed his eyes and bit his bottom lip, waiting for the tingling pain to pass while blood circualation returned to his legs. He stretched his tail tenatively and rubbed some feeling back into his arms as he waited for the medical team to arrive so that they could remove the various apparatus that had helped keep him alive for the duration of the trip. Raditz took off the oxygen mask by himself but was somewhat squeamish about needles, otherwise he might have risked removing the IVs on his own.
He glanced once at the rest of the narrow room. It only took that one glance to confirm that he had no idea who any of the other warriors were. It had been a different group when he'd first been knocked out. The trip must have been a long one if they'd stopped somewhere along the way to rotate the warriors.
Rotation was another tactic designed to keep the low class soldiers from rebeling. Constantly sending the soldiers off to different commanders meant that the soldiers had no idea who their peers were most of the time. They always fought alongside a different set of soldiers. They never mourned the warriors killed in battle because the dead were strangers. So the sight of the single warrior on the wall that had failed to wake up didn't bother anyone - no one knew him. No one had any reason to care that he was dead.
It was this concept that bothered Raditz. If he'd been the one that had failed to wake up, no one would care. No one would have even known his name.
Well, not no one. Not exactly. There was one person aboard the spacecraft that would have known his name and that was the other thing that bothered Raditz. All the other warriors around him had been rotated but he hadn't. It wasn't the first time this had happened. It was becoming ever more apparent that for some unfathomable reason, Raditzs commanding officer had taken a special interest in him. Lieutenant Zarbon wanted to keep him around.
Raditz wasn't yet old enough to be sure whether this was bad or good news. It could mean a promotion in the long run or it could mean something else entirely. He didn't care to speculate about it so he mentally switched the subjects, idly thinking about the slow-motion dream sequences that he'd experienced while hibernating.
Most of his dreams weren't terribly imaginative. Raditz had just relived parts of his earlier childhood. He had a few hazy recollections of the boarding school where he'd spent most of his early life sparring with other saiyan children. Then one day things had changed. The announcement had come from King Vegeta himself, saying that the saiyan race had allied with Freezia and that the proud saiyan warriors were going to conquer planets in exchange for better technology and increased wealth.
Raditz had been nearly two years old when that announcement had been made. Being a toddler, he hadn't cared less at the time but the decision had come with consequences that affected him. Freezias representatives had moved quickly to convince King Vegeta that it would be a sign of good faith in the political relationship - as well as a wonderful educational opportunity - if a group of saiyan children were sent to attend a school on one of Freezias planets.
After some deliberation, King Vegeta had agreed to send some low-class saiyan children. Maybe the children of low-class warriors were sent because the saiyan elite didn't trust Freezia with their own offspring. Maybe the low-class warriors were sent because they were expected to eventually betray their own heritage and it would be easier to defeat bunch of third-class waifs. Whatever the reasons for the decision, it was made and acted upon. Raditz and nearly thirty of his boarding school peers had ended up attending a military institution on an alien world. Only four of those saiyan children had survived to graduation. Most of the rest had died from various alien illnesses or vicious playground battles.
Raditz wasn't sure of his age anymore - being asleep for long trips and being out in space where it was always dark had permanently distorted his sense of time. He knew that the events of his dreams had been a while ago but he couldn't be sure of how long ago. He glanced down at himself and sincerely hoped that he wasn't supposed to be a teenager yet. Raditz worried about things like this because if he was a teenager then all the induced sleeping he'd done over the past few years had severly stunted his growth. For the most part, he still looked like a toddler - although a little taller, with slightly longer hair and better defined muscles.
Inwardly, Raditz sighed. It was hard to intimidate opponents when you didn't look all that scary.
These thoughts had taken only a few moments, during which time the medical group had arrived. The medical group - or at least the small part of it that had come to this room - consisted of two creatures. Each one was clad in a dark green uniform with the standard sanitary rubber gloves, hairnets and facemasks. One of the medics was tall with pale yellow skin, no eyebrows, pointed ears and a long nose. The other creatures most noticable trait was that it had four arms and no legs, it oozed around on the slimy base of its body. All that these two did was unhook the various medical equipment that had keep the warriors alive - a bunch of tubes and wires with fancy names.
Raditz was glad for the interruption. But that subdued happiness was fleeting.
The medics proceeded to stamp each of the six revived warriors with a bright orange warning symbol. They'd been in the same room as a dead guy. That meant that the six warriors that had been successfully revived would now have to be quarantined while medical tests were done to determine how many of them were sick. If any evidence was found that the dead guy had died from something that was contagious then they'd all be killed because there was no point in risking an epidemic.
As he was being herded out of the room, Raditz paused to scowl at the corpse. If the warrior hadn't already been dead then Raditz would have been tempted to kill him. He hated medical tests with a passion and a quarantine meant, among other things, that it was going to be long time before he was allowed to get something decent to eat. Much as Raditz would have liked to have resisted the medics, he really wasn't able to. His joints were still too stiff and numb from the hibernation, it was taking a considerable amount of effort just to walk without limping.
He hoped cat was okay. On his way to the infirmary, Raditz looked around for some sign of the pesky animal that had insisted on following him everywhere but there wasn't any indication that the animal was around. Usually the cat was sitting right by the door of the room, waiting there to greet Raditz when he was woken up from hibernation. The stupid animal probably got better treatment than he did. Raditz felt a mild sense of blended alarm and disappointment at the animals absence but he kept walking, reminding himself that true warriors weren't supposed to give a damn about that kind of thing.
A bit late for that though, the cat had already become important to him.
It had started out as caution. Raditz had figured that if he'd been told to keep the cat then there had to be some reason, some catch. Maybe the animal was poisoness or something, maybe that's why almost everyone else thought it was bad luck. Raditz couldn't read a word of his native language - saiyan - but he had been taught to read Common, the universal language. Common was the language that all the aliens in Freezias empire had to learn in order to communicate with each other.
Although it had been ages since he'd read anything and his reading skills had been a been rusty, Raditz had managed to get the hang of it again. True, he could have just asked for help. There were bound to be a few literate warriors around - most the flight crew could read. But Raditz had always disliked asking for help. Asking for help seemed to imply that you'd owe someone a favor later, it was just the sort of dependacy that warriors in general didn't like to be associated with. So Raditz had taken the time to brush up his reading skills and in the process, he had accidentally rediscovered the thrill of a good book.
It wasn't something that Raditz would ever admit to but he enjoyed reading. Aside from being a good way to get information, reading was kind of an escape. Raditz blamed the cat for making him realize that, for making him doubt his self-worth and wish that he was better educated. At least he had been reassured to find out that most species of cat were not known to be poisoness and that bad luck itself was mostly a myth.
Even more importantly, the cat was a time piece. A living calendar, of sorts. The cat had unwittlingly become one of the only measures of time that Raditz had. Raditz could now mentally organize everything in his own life in accordance with whatever cat had been doing at that time. For example, his early life fell under the label before I met cat and he had accumulated a few scattered memories that could be labeled when cat was small. Part of the reason Raditz had looked forward to seeing the animal was because if cat had grown a lot then he'd know for sure that quite a bit of time must have passed.
The other main reason he had hoped to see the cat was because it was just kind of nice to have something around that could be considered a friend. Nice to know that not everyone was indifferent. En route to the infirmary, Raditz quietly shuffled by perhaps a hundred other warriors. He passed creatures of every imaginable description as he filed down the numerous hallways. Yet there was no laughter, no kidding around, nobody even spoke to each other - because none of these creatures were friends.
Raditz remembered the playgrounds where he'd been told that friendship was for weaklings, a waste of time. But anymore he wondered if maybe he'd just been taught that because none of his teachers'd had friends. Maybe friendship was a really a luxury, something that not even Freezia could buy. Raditz sincerely hoped so. That was just the sort of irony that could cheer him up. The mere idea that he, a low-class warrior, could possess something that a wealthy powerful tyrant couldn't... It just made life worth living some days.
The six tired warriors arrived at the spacecrafts quarantine room, near the infirmary. They were scheduled for medical testing. Raditz was the only one smirking.