Vegeta plucked the broken components of his back-up scouter off of his face as he watched the medium Frieza-force style spacecraft vanish into the sky in a burst of light, leaving his team alone on a godforsaken desert of a planet with nothing but their ship and the rations that'd been packed onto it, disgusting nutrient bars that'd be enough to sustain them for several years if rationed properly, even by Saiyan standards.
"...Dammit, Tarble." He muttered to himself, "NAPPA! Set a course! We're following that ship!"
"Right, Vegeta!"
…
The woman… Mel… gave Vegeta two conditions before she was willing to give him the information he required. Firstly, he stopped calling her 'woman' and began calling her by her name. This annoyed him, but he didn't protest.
The second condition was that she was only willing to talk after they left the planet.
As such, they waited in the cave for a few hours. Eventually, once they felt it was late enough, they made their move.
With Vegeta's sense of direction, even in the dark without scouters, finding the landing spot, where Nappa, Raditz, and Soy had dug a hole and, in a similar manner to the one Mel had chosen, hidden the four individual spaceships and the one larger medium-sized spacecraft that had landed via remote piloting while Vegeta had been away.
Nappa, tracking Vegeta with his scouter, came out to greet the duo.
Five minutes later, Vegeta was sending the four individual pods to the nearest Frieza Force base, and climbing into the new, medium-sized spaceship to check it out.
The Frieza force utilized four separate models of spaceship. Due to the fact that technology hadn't advanced much in the last fifty years or so, these models hadn't changed at all since.
The individual pods were designed for small groups, and the most popular type of ship. They were the fastest type of spacecraft available, and most squadrons of five or less utilized them to get around the universe due to their incredible convenience.
The small, individual pods were also the only type of spacecraft that came with stasis devices, which essentially slowed one's bodily functions to nearly nothing during interstellar travel, so that no matter how much time passed, it simply felt like a short nap. That, combined with the life support features that came built into the pods allowed one to travel long distances to bases capable of providing actual healing and support.
The medium sized spaceships were meant to house twenty. They had a medical bay, a small storage compartment filled with basic essentials, such as food and water, two barracks (one private, for the leader, and one meant to cram twenty people into as tight a space as physically possible) and a bridge.
The larger ships were rare, essentially the same thing, but equipped for five times the crew and with enough space that nobody had any reason to feel cramped.
Then, Frieza's ship was basically a large complex that floated through space.
While most of Frieza's other squadron leaders commanded a medium-sized ship or two at the least, Vegeta's squad had never had any particular problems simply making do with the individual ships.
Honestly, Vegeta hadn't particularly cared about it before. Quality over quantity. He didn't care about the way Cui constantly boasted about having command of a fleet that required five medium-sized ships to house, because Nappa was capable of carving a hole through every single one of those underlings without much of a fight, and their power levels didn't degrade due to disuse over the course of long fights.
Now, Vegeta's nose wrinkled as he walked through the ship's single corridor, which was barely large enough to house Nappa's large frame.
Putting his actual opinion of the ship off for now, Vegeta placed his backup scouter, pulled from his pod before he'd sent it on his way, onto his face and checked to ensure that his entire team was on board (they were) before pressing the launch button. The absolute priority at the moment was getting off of the planet. Anything and everything else could come later.
…
As the nameless planet shrunk in the viewing window, Vegeta and Mel were silent, staring.
Vegeta had the urge to pop out of the ship for a moment and destroy the planet in question with his most powerful Galick Gun right here and now, but he restrained himself for two reasons: Because it was likely that even that would fail, with the intense energy in the planet's atmosphere acting as a natural blocking mechanism, and secondly, to burn the humiliation that he'd suffered on that planet into his mind so that it could push him to claw his way to greater heights, so that when he returned, and he would return, he could pay the suffering back ten… no, a thousandfold, and bring every single native of that hellish planet to heel with his own power.
If he managed to destroy the planet now, that motivation would disappear.
So, instead, he turned his back to the past, for now, and shifted his focus to the present.
"I'll be in the medical chamber. Do not disturb me." Vegeta warned the rest of the crew, walking away without another word.
Nappa, Raditz, and Soy looked confused. The ship didn't even have a course yet, they were simply drifting aimlessly through the cosmos… but right now, Vegeta didn't care.