Once he was coherent again, Carlos Vargas summoned all his strength and dragged himself to his feet. It was amazing how a well-placed blow could make you feel like you'd been hit by a Peterbilt. Rising to the occasion at hand, he prepared to haul his friend Andros all the way down to the infirmary. It seemed to be the only safe place imaginable.
He found he had been right about the quarantine field, and took a moment to linger in the room, breathing his first lungful of fresh air in hours. Giving Andros a hypodermic spray full of relaxant, he began to search the compartments for a gas mask of some kind. Finally he found a compact transparent oxygen mask and a small tank with a belt clip to match. Strapping the assembly on, he checked the field stability once more. The others had only a short amount of time left before their bodies would succumb to the fumes and die. Vatoya Tamlyn could wait. He had to get the rest of the team to safety. Leaving Andros to recover in the quarantine field, Carlos systematically began to search the ship for his remaining three friends.
He found Cassie in the gas-choked Work Bay, draped across her Galaxy Glider. He could hardly see her through the thick clouds floating in the room. He was also forced to wonder why Tamlyn hadn't used one of the Gliders to escape the ship, but then he remembered you had to be morphed to do that. The fumes from before were making him think sluggishly.
TJ was on the SimuDeck, guarded by a holographic attack dog. Apparently, Tamlyn had gotten it working again for just that purpose. While wary of the imaginary animal, Carlos simply had to go to the control panel and turn all the safeties on so that the creation could not possibly injure him. Then he dragged TJ out of there and back to the Infirmary as well.
Ashley was difficult to retrieve. She was in the Engine Room, hidden high above on the upper catwalk. Carlos had enough trouble getting up the ladder, but moving around so high off the ground was risky in his current cognitive state. It took an age, but finally he and Ashley dropped to the floor again, her body collapsing limply to the ground. She had been exposed to the fumes the longest, and was probably just minutes away from suffocating way up high in the thick of things. Carlos was grateful to let her join the others in the clean-aired refuge of the quarantine field.
Just as he was laying Ashley down on the third bed, Andros started to awaken. His body was beginning to process the toxic gasses and clear them out of his lungs. He lifted his tired head and groggily demanded, "What's going on? Where's the fire?"
Carlos collapsed into a chair and removed his mask to breathe some real air.
"Long story." he sighed. "No time to explain. I've gotta go find the Princess again." The Black Ranger rubbed his jaw tenderly. It still ached like all-get-out, but he couldn't let himself be slowed down.
Andros was trying to struggle out of bed but he was too disoriented. Carlos wasn't worried about him.
"Stay here." he said. "Make sure the others are ok. I'm going after Tamlyn."
"Carlos wait," Andros cried. "She's dangerous, you can't go alone."
But Carlos simply laughed. "Who are you, and what have you done with Andros?" The Red Ranger could only could only shake his head in confusion.
"Listen," Carlos tried again. "I got us into this mess, and I'm the only one who can get us out. Besides, the gas isn't fully out of your system, you couldn't walk out of here if you tried." Andros thudded his head lightly against the pillow. Carlos glanced at his chronometer. "If I'm not back in about fifteen minutes..." he began, stopping to think for a moment.
"What?" Andros asked.
The Black Ranger shrugged. "Just wait longer." And then he was gone.
The brief amount of time spent in the good air had restored some of Carlos' faculties. He was thinking clearer now, and as he trudged down the hallway he had a pretty good idea of where Princess Vatoya would be. He headed for the ShuttleBay.
Carlos took a moment to adjust the straps of his gas mask. It was 10:00 hours.
If the events of that morning had told him anything, it was that their saboteur was not very diplomatically inclined. Vatoya had spent the past week trying to kill them all in order to gain control of the Megaship herself. She hadn't bothered to try and talk to the Rangers, and so she never knew they would have been willing to help her. Her ignorance had nearly cost lives. Aside from that, she was being reckless with the damage she was causing. The equipment she was destroying was going to take her weeks to repair by herself, and it would be a long time before she could take the ship home again. It was Carlos' intention to reason with her if he could, but she had already shown she was a dangerous individual. If he had to, he was willing to fight.
The one clue Carlos had now as to her whereabouts, was the command she had entered before leaving him and Andros on the bridge earlier. He had stopped to see what she had done, and found a mini-disk in the slot, feeding a computer virus into DECA's already ravaged computer core. The virus was meant to convince DECA that the Rangers were a biological hazard and needed to be exterminated. Eventually, DECA would have proceeded to wipe out all life forms on board the ship with more poison. The only way Tamlyn could possibly escape the annihilation, was if she escaped the ship itself somehow; and the only way she could escape was in the Astro Megaship Shuttle. She likely planned to wait out the extermination attempt and then return once the poison had dissipated and the Rangers were dead. It would have worked perfectly had Carlos not removed the disk in time. He only hoped he wasn't too late to catch the saboteur before she took off with the Astro Megazord's head.
The Rangers didn't find themselves in the Megashuttle much these days. Only during Zord excursions did they take their places in its cockpit, and most of the time it sat dormant in the forward shuttle compartment. Carlos reached it quickly, and ducked into the remote launch room. This was a tiny cubicle with a viewport looking out on the huge ShuttleBay. From here he could normally control the doors, forcefields and docking clamps, but the controls were smashed. He could do nothing to stop Tamlyn from here. He would have to board the ship and take it over himself.
Crossing the expansive ShuttleBay, Carlos climbed the ladder and slipped through the open hatch into the shuttle. Quiet as a cat, he moved towards the cockpit, hoping that he could get the jump on the Princess there. Little did he know he was being watched with every step he took.
The cockpit was deserted, Carlos found, but the controls were programmed for an automatic launch to occur in one minute. He quickly set to overriding the command.
As he stood unsuspectingly at the controls, a petite, dark haired figure extracted herself from the ventilation grate on the ceiling. Even quieter than a cat, she prepared to drop down onto the Black Ranger from above. He would never know what hit him.
Unfortunately for her, Carlos was so accustomed to a silent ship that he heard her movements, and whirled in time to see her poised above. He dove and rolled out of the way just as she leaped from the ceiling and brought a heavy metal pipe down on the console where he had just been.
"Fancy meeting you here!" he exclaimed, leaping to his feet. The last time he had seen this woman's face, was when she was lying "dead" in the Torpedo tube. It was unnerving to see her alive and kicking now.
"I could say the same for you." she replied, in heavily accented Standard. "I thought I left you to die with your Power Ranger friends on the other ship."
"You did." Carlos replied. "But I came back. Funny how that works, eh?"
She swung at him with the pipe and he ducked it. She swung again and he threw himself out the cockpit door and into the next cabin. She followed, and together they began a deadly dance all through the compartments of the shuttle. Carlos couldn't locate a weapon to match her pipe, and had to be careful that he didn't get bludgeoned to death. She was a skilled fighter, he had to admit, but no better than himself; and he did have greater size to his advantage. Even with her weapon, he could control the fight to a degree.
She knew it, too, and was getting desperate.
"Why are you doing this?" Carlos demanded, slipping past a charge and knocking her away. "We could help you if you'd let us!"
She swung again, a snarl twisting her features. "What can you possibly do for me?" she scoffed.
"We can get you back home! We would have been glad to return you to your people, but you decided to try and kill us first. What could a Princess from another quadrant have against us anyway?"
She stopped fighting for a moment, looking stunned. "Princess??" she repeated. "Ashes of Barox, you still believe I'm that little Princess Vatoya Tamlyn?" She began to laugh hysterically. Carlos couldn't help but feel a little confused.
"You pathetic fool!" she cried. "I look nothing like Tamlyn, I can't believe you fell for that!"
"Then who the hell are you?" Carlos yelled.
"My name's Zageth, I'm a freelance assassin." she replied. "I went to Saskat to kill the Sovereign, but their petty war broke out while I was still on the inside. I overheard the Sovereign recording the message that he was going to send away with his daughter, and so I blasted my way in, tied them up and took her place. She's still on that sun-baked rock she calls a homeworld!"
Zageth's story was almost unbelievable, but Carlos knew there was no reason for her to lie. Especially since he now knew she had every intention of killing him. Shaking her head at the gullibility of the human race, she thrust her pipe at him again and the fight was resumed.
After an indeterminate amount of time, they ended up back in the cockpit again, where Carlos had fewer places to move around. The small floorspace gave him just enough area to block the strikes and swings she made, and hit back as well. They were almost stalemated, trapped within each other's hitting range.
"Wait till they hear I took out a Power Ranger!" Zageth gloated as she fought. It was all Carlos could do to protect himself, backed there against the console with nowhere to go.
Finally, he hit her back hard enough to knock her right through the silver cockpit door. He heard her crash to the ground, and the door swung closed behind her. Tentatively, Carlos took a few steps forward to follow her, but he could hear no movement from the other side. Panting from the long fight, he wondered what was in store next.
Zageth didn't leave him thinking long.
Bursting back through the doorway, she ran at him with her club held high and a loud battle cry issuing from her throat. In a panic, Carlos flung himself backward, tripped on his own two feet, and fell flat on his behind. Just as she was bringing the club down, he thrust his feet out towards her stomach.
Instead of smashing the pipe down onto his face, Zageth went flying over him, past the consoles and directly through the windshield of the Megashuttle. Carlos heard her scream all the way down to the deck below, and flinched as there came an audible crunch of bones upon impact. He could do nothing for a moment but lay there, stunned and frozen and unable to believe what he had just done.
Finally, he got to his feet and looked out the smashed windshield to the deck below. Zageth's body lay sprawled in an awkward position on the ShuttleBay floor, bits of glass scattered all around her. The pipe hadn't left her hand, and she still gripped it tightly. Carlos was both relieved and repulsed by the sight of her.
Suddenly, her eyes snapped open and Carlos gasped. Before his eyes, she began to straighten herself out and return her joints to the proper sockets so that she could stand. She was not finished yet.
Suddenly, "DECA standing by for orders." said a voice.
"DECA!" Carlos cried. "You can talk!"
"Affirmative." said the computer, in an almost sassy tone.
Carlos thought quickly. "DECA, erect a level eight forcefield around the Megashuttle and then open the shuttle bay doors!"
DECA complied. A sparkling forcefield sprung up around the Megashuttle right away, sealing off the hole in the cockpit windshield. Then there came the great, echoing alert siren that warned of the doors about to be opened. It wasn't warning enough though, for just as Zageth was getting to her feet, the seals cracked open and the entire nose of the Astro Megaship began to split in two. As the bay was exposed to the vacuum of space, the oxygen inside, as well as everything else not tied down, was blown rapidly out into the universe. Zageth the Assassin went with them, screaming curses all the way.
Once again, Carlos took pause in the aftermath of it all; then he released a breath he thought he'd been holding for weeks. He collapsed into his seat and lay his tired head down on the panel, vowing that he would go to sleep right there and not awaken for another week or two.
But his thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a familiar voice. "Carlos, come in. It's me, Andros."
"Hmm..?" he mumbled.
"Carlos, are you ok? Where are you?"
"I'm fine." he replied. "I'm in the Megashuttle. Vatoya Tamlyn's not a problem for us anymore."
"Was DECA able to get in contact with you? We just spent the past twenty minutes trying to fix her so we could regain control of the ship."
"Well you did it." the Black Ranger said. "She's back online and she helped save my butt."
Carlos yawned lionishly. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm taking a nap."
"What?"
"A nap, Andros." he said testily. "You know...sleep? You remember sleep, don't you?"
Andros began to laugh. "Alright. Good work, man. You saved all our butts today."
There was no response.
"Carlos?"
Faint snoring came over the channel.
"Pleasant dreams, Carlos." The channel went dead and there was silence in the Megashuttle cabin.
Then Carlos opened one eye and smiled a little. "You know DECA," he said. "I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but am I ever glad to hear your voice again."