I dropped into my office chair, tired after putting Bell to sleep.
She'd stayed up late today. It was noon.
It was strange to be dog tired at noon, but it was also why the girls and I had a rotation schedule for who was assigned to stay up with Bell.
Last night had been my turn, which meant I didn't have the wherewithal to train today. I'd done a few exercises last night, anyways, bringing Bell out with Novem to watch. Bell enjoyed watching me train. When I trained in front of her, she was usually quiet. Not 'asleep' quiet, but the other, much rarer quiet.
Tonight would be Pepper's turn.
Novem itself, after upgrading, didn't actually need to shut off on a regular basis anymore, so it always helped out with Bell.
Bell liked Novem.
Or maybe she was scared of it? Either way, she didn't harass Novem the same way that she liked to harass me, Pepper, and Lynn.
When Pepper, Lynn or I held her, she'd instinctively release energy.
Sometimes, that simply meant random bouts of incredible strength. Other times, it meant explosions, or simply ki pressure.
Once, Pepper picked her up and she just vanished through a window, flying at mid-hundred-thousands level speed and crashing into the street outside.
I'd felt sorry for the street that day.
That street didn't deserve to be deleted like that.
Bell didn't do that sort of thing as often when Novem held her.
Every once in a while, she'd try to wiggle out of Novem's grip, or accidentally nearly blow a hole through the android's metal skull, but that was natural stuff that she did to anyone.
One time, Lynn had needed to save Miss Dahlia from a short-ranged sneeze.
Dangers of being near a full-blooded Saiyan baby. Not everyone had the stuff for it.
I shook my head, pushing the thoughts of my daughter out of my head.
It was actually pretty hard. She'd dominated around two-thirds of every moment since she'd been born.
Luckily, the information on my console, as I turned it on, managed to pull my attention.
There was a lot.
Ever since I revamped Slug's ship into a massive cruiser, retrofitted everything, and roofied my brother and his subordinates onboard, Zeck, Bulma, the older doctors, and I had been working overtime preparing for Frieza's arrival.
Specifically, we'd set our sights on space.
Bulma and her father had focused on setting up a massive sensor net that covered a large sector of space surrounding the Milky Way galaxy.
Dr. Hyperion had focused on more practical aspects.
Field data. In-galaxy specifications.
His goal had been, essentially, to map the entire galaxy. Planetary composition, atmospheric composition, gravity, temperature, material scatter, toughness, and dozens of other attributes.
They showed up as soon as I pulled the holographic interface on my desk up.
I pushed them aside for now. I'd already studied much of the relevant details.
Instead, I pulled up the three things that actually mattered to me at the moment.
They appeared in three separate holograms above the desk.
I flicked them apart and adjusted the individual scales of each.
To my left, it showed a larger-scale map of the galaxy. There were only two points on it. One was Earth. I flicked closer onto the other one, until Earth disappeared from the rendering and it focused in on an enlarged version of the other thing.
The ship I'd made for Vegeta.
With mild cosmetic modifications.
It looked lived-in now. According to the tracker, Vegeta had finally figured out how to override the lock I'd lazily placed on the destination targeting, so that he couldn't easily return to Earth.
I'd figured he'd manage that one eventually. If I'd locked the destination more thoroughly, he'd have just stolen another spaceship.
The number of energy signatures aboard the ship had multiplied. Notably over fifty by now. Vegeta had been busy.
The ship's top-tier engine had probably helped with that. Trips that would have required months before, now required mere days.
He was still roughly a week away from Earth, though.
I used the backdoor I'd built into the ship's systems to look through a few security feeds. He'd filled the hanger bay with ships. Saiyans trained freely under gravity in the training rooms (Except for the smaller, high-gravity ones. Vegeta and his elites each claimed one of those), and Mel walked out of the main quarters with a sharp-faced baby in her arms at one point, rather surprising me.
I reinforced some of the built-in Earth-proximity measures, then dismissed the feed to Vegeta's ship completely.
While he'd be able to get to the Milky Way galaxy, I'd programmed the ship so that it wouldn't be able to get any closer to the inner planets than Saturn. If he wanted to actually go to Earth, he'd need to use the smaller, clunkier ships and take fewer people.
Fewer people, I could deal with.
After dismissing Vegeta's ship from the feed, my attention shifted to the right hand hologram.
This was also a map, showing how far Earth was from something.
In this case, it was something that'd entered the sensory zone a few days ago.
Frieza's fleet.
Ir was significantly closer, spatially, than Vegeta's ship was.
That did not mean that Frieza would get to the solar system first. His engines were made from models invented by people, quite frankly, working with significantly less data than us Earth-based scientists.
Or maybe they just weren't as crazy.
Either possibility led to the same road. Frieza's ships were obsolete.
Frieza's fleet was about two weeks out, give or take.
It was also significantly more annoying than Vegeta's ship. I could control Vegeta's ship remotely without actually risking anything, since I'd designed the system.
While I probably could hack Frieza's fleet, it likely wouldn't be worth it, and it was much more likely that the reprogramming would be spotted and overwritten.
Vegeta was smart, but he didn't have the skills to do that. His ship, and thus, technically his life, was entirely mine to toy with at my whim.
All I could do with Frieza's fleet was observe and track it.
Put together, Frieza's entire fleet roughly equaled the total space on Vegeta's ship. Total population, somewhere just under ten thousand, maybe. Each ship was significantly smaller than Vegeta's new ship, with even the flagship itself being rather small for something that a large number of people were required to live in for months, even years on end.
Which actually made a sort of sense, if one thought about it.
Frieza could survive indefinitely in a complete vacuum. His species was hyper-evolved specifically for near-perfect survivability. He didn't need much to be comfortable. Going between ships was as simple as walking out the airlock to him. A large number of smaller ships that could serve different functions was much more useful to him specifically than a singular, possibly slower, large ship.
The fleet was collected, all traveling together at a specific rate. Stable power level in the mid hundred-thousands confirmed, rarely straying from the flagship.
He'd enter the solar system in about two weeks.
All my preparations were in place.