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There was one, brief moment of utter silence outside the ore processing plant after JJ's warning. John was the first to react.

"Shit!" he exclaimed, springing to his feet with the ease and grace of a trained warrior. "Metal heads."

Alice wasn't too far behind him, calling, "Then let's give it to 'em, hotter'n hell."

Lexia tried to follow their example, but she suddenly found herself frozen stiff in absolute terror. Various memories stirred in her mind; of Mirracon and before even that; of their actual abduction by Frax's Cyclobots.

The Cyclobots were swarming out now in droves. Lexia could see John tangling with four or five of the bronze robots; Alice seemed to be moving around the battle site in a blur of white, taking on and destroying any bots that crossed her path; Rick was taking on two bots, playing one against the other and letting them beat each other up rather than him.

She was the only ranger not involved, and that was because she was scared.

Weak.

Useless.

"You are not useless or weak, Lexia," her therapist had told her in her first appointment, and a week ago, she'd almost been able to believe it.

Not any more.

She was a complete and utter coward.

~*~

Namir stared in mixed outright shock and confusion.

"Got nothing to say?" sneered The Master. "No, 'hi dad'?"

"You're not my dad," Namir shot back, anger bringing back his powers of speech. "I don't know who or what you are, but you're not him."

The Master laughed; an awful, mocking sound that seemed to fill the store room. "So, so wrong." The contempt was cutting.

Namir just glared back. "My dad is Alan Drake. He's a civilian pilot."

More laughter. "My, my, my; you are a deluded little bastard." Namir opened his mouth to snap a retort, but The Master was already continuing, "Lemme tell you a story, Namir Drake. Lemme tell you a little piece of real history."

~*~

Paralysed by fear as she was, something slowly trickled through Lexia's mind. Not all of the Rangers were all right. Her gaze fell finally on the newest Ranger, JJ.

He wasn't all right.

He was surrounded.

He needed help.

Why was no-one helping him?

Someone had to help him.

~*~

JJ found himself falling back under an onslaught of blows from the robots surrounding him. As much as the information rush and his own skills helped, he couldn't seem to match what the robots were throwing at him.

He needed help, but there was no-one who could help. Everyone had their hands full with the robots.

And then he found himself firmly gripped by two of the robots surrounding him. A third was looming over him, weapon raised and ready. JJ struggled against the two bots holding him, but their grip was too strong and in one crystal clear moment, he knew he was going to die; that there was nothing he could do to stop it.

And the next moment, the third bot seemed to suddenly fly backwards of its own volition. It took JJ a moment to register the fact that actually, the robot had been hit by a stream of pink energy. A second later and the two robots imprisoning him had also been destroyed. A second later still, and Lexia had joined him.

"All right?" she asked, keeping her blaster out and ready.

"Terrified," JJ admitted. "You?"

"Same," Lexia confessed. "And I think it's time the Cyclobots paid for making me feel this way."

JJ managed a smile as he drew his own blaster. "Sounds like a plan to me."

~*~

"There was man," The Master began. "Guy called Alex Collins. Big hero. Everybody thought he was fantastic; brave; clever. Hell, he was the man who defeated Biocon and cornered Ransik. That right there was one reason why he had such a big man reputation..."

"I know who Alex Collins was," Namir cut in.

The Master laughed. "Ah, but you don't. That's the whole problem, Namir Drake; you don't know who he is."

"And I suppose you do." Namir was sarcastic.

The Master's laughter increased. "You might say that."

"You're deluded."

"And you're misguided," The Master shot back. "You're blinded by the rhetoric and the crap that your friends have told you. They've glorified Alex Collins. Deified him. Well let me tell you, Namir Drake, he's no God. He's no hero. If he was really a hero," The Master continued, rapidly working himself into an insane fury, "he wouldn't have left me to rot when his friends," and The Master spat the term as if it were a curse, "interfered."

None of this was making sense as far as Namir was concerned.

"I'll break it down for you," The Master continued, his voice dropping from rant to drawl. "Alex Collins isn't as dead as everyone thinks he is."

Namir had half been expecting The Master to say that and had an answer ready: "You're not him. The real Alex Collins died ten years ago."

Oddly, though, The Master just looked smug. "Oh yeah; guess you don't know so much, huh, Namir Drake?"

Namir scowled. "I've had just about..."

"Alpha: Online."

And Namir found himself rigidly frozen in place, unable to move or speak.

"So much better." The Master snickered. "It's a pity Merle Askot's dead, or otherwise, I'd be thanking her; she's made my revenge so much sweeter." Namir glowered. "Now, where was I? Oh yeah. Alex Coward Collins." The Master gave a laugh. "Or should that be Alan Drake?"

~*~

John dropped into a crouch and executed a leg sweep to take out another half a dozen Cyclobots. "Damnit," he mumbled, springing back to his feet. "Does this guy have a replicator going or something?"

A bark of familiar but mocking laughter drew John's attention outwards from his own situation. Glancing round, he found the source and felt his blood run cold. Standing just off the battlefield, arms folded in a casual pose and with a sneering expression on his face, was his father.

Part of John knew that it wasn't the real Eric Myers. He knew that his father was unwell; that his time in the future had done medical and psychological damage; that The Master had already cloned him at least once before. But all that paled in the face of seeing him exactly as he remembered and sporting the sort of expression he had frequently imagined seeing on his father's face.

"I'm disappointed in you."

It took John a second to realise that there was an actual echo of the words. Someone had spoken them.

"You're a failure."

For just a second, John heard the words he'd half expected to hear from his father, in his father's voice, and believed them. Then cold, hard anger filled the pit of his stomach. No matter what his relationship with Eric was like, he knew his father would never act like this.

And this was not his father.

This was the creation made by the man who'd orchestrated this whole mess and who had, above all, hurt his father.

With a growl, John launched himself at the clone.

~*~

Alice heard the Eric clone's voice and risked a glance in that direction. Having been fooled by a clone herself, she opened her mouth to warn John that it a clone was all it was, but before she could, she heard her brother give a feral snarl of anger and he dived for the clone.

Alice wanted to feel relieved by that, but given the respective skill levels of John and the real Eric -- skills that she had to assume the clone possessed too -- relief wasn't easy to come by. At least John has a strength advantage... But that thought died a death the instant she saw the Eric clone dodge John's first attack. Her gaze was drawn to the clone's left wrist. Oh shit. Strapped to the clone's wrist was the Quantum Morpher.

And as if he'd read her mind, or more likely because the clone's train of thought was very much the same as her dad's, he used the morpher and evened the contest even further.

"Hey, Sweet cheeks; what say you and I dance?" drawled another familiar voice, dragging Alice's attention away from her brother.

The other clones had joined the battle now. It was the Rick clone who was speaking to her, a lascivious leer on his face.

"In your dreams," Alice retorted.

"My dreams," he began, launching an attack. "Your nightmares."

~*~

Namir felt his blood run cold at The Master's words. He wanted to refute them but whatever it was The Master had done to him prevented him from giving voice.

"I told you," The Master warned. "He didn't die at Rancho Diablo. You see, he has these two pesky friends, I think you know them. Interfering bastards both of them. Without them, he'd have died of his own accord when he was nineteen. But no! They had to intervene."

Namir stared, his surprise rapidly mounting. What the hell did all this mean? And still he couldn't ask.

The Master grinned wolfishly. "Oh yeah, I guess his alcoholic past doesn't get a whole lot of publicity either." Namir felt sick. "Well Rob Logan and Ven Desouza did intervene. They sobered him up and kept him that way. And then, when he turned suicidal again, they tagged him with a temporal transponder. When he detonated the explosives and took out the Mutorgs, they dragged him back to the thirty-first century." The Master's grin faded into a scowl. "And that action created a temporal fold."

The pieces slotted into place in Namir's mind and he understood. The Master was an exact, temporal duplicate of Alex Collins. It had happened before. Namir was fairly sure he'd read, somewhere, about temporal duplicates being created in the early days of temporal exploration, when safe-guards hadn't truly been established. It was one reason why temporal transponders were barely used; although it wasn't a process guaranteed to create a temporal duplicate, it happened more times than it didn't. But if Namir now understood what The Master was, he was still confused as to exactly what he was after now.

"Do you know where it dumped me?" The Master continued rhetorically. "It left me in the 2500s. In the middle of the Purges."

~*~

Rick wondered vaguely just which piece of bad karma it was that was currently biting him in the ass. How was it that he was the one who got to fight with the John clone and a small army of Cyclobots? He ought to have been winning the fight easily; he was the one who had his strength, speed and skill augmented by being morphed, but the John clone had all of John's memory implants and, it seemed, a double dose of strength, while the Cyclobots had numbers on their side.

"This is not my day," he muttered, dropping back under the onslaught. But that just took him back into the bank of waiting Cyclobots.

He fought out of the cluster, but that took him back into the John clone's path.

"Need a hand?" enquired a new voice over the Ranger comm. system. And for a second, Rick couldn't recognise it. Then he saw a flash of red energy flash between him and the John clone to destroy a Cyclobot and it finally penetrated that the voice belonged to his father.

"Dad?" Rick was sufficiently surprised that for a second, he took his eye off the John clone, who promptly floored him with a skilful leg sweep.

"Not just me," Wes answered, hauling Rick back to his feet and landing a solid kick to the John Clone's shoulder.

As Rick regained his balance, he realised the truth of that: Not only was Wes there, fully morphed; so were the blue, yellow, green and pink Time Force Rangers.

"What say we give back to these guys what they've done to us," added another fresh voice, drawing Rick's attention to another band of new arrivals.

Rick was taken aback; the speaker, Ben, sounded as angrier than Rick had ever heard him. To Ben's left were three other Guardians, Paul Miller, Jenny Deslaurier and Mara Reed, all of whom looked almost as angry. To Ben's right was Nadira, who looked ready to tear anyone apart.

Rick found himself smiling. Reinforcements, indeed.

~*~

Namir felt sick all over again. The Purges had been one of the worst times in Galactic history. They had been the outcome of a long and harsh galactic war, the likes of which had never been seen before or since, and human kind had been on the losing side. The victors, The Vermink, then attempted to purge the galaxy of all humans and the Purges had begun. To be a human in that period was to be hunted and, if caught, tortured.

The Master was nodding. "I see you know what that means. Well try imagining this, Namir Drake: Running from hole to hole, all the while knowing that if they catch you, you're dead. Living in fear of your life every single second of each day." The Master shook back the voluminous robe he was wearing to reveal bare and heavily scarred arms. "Try being caught by The Vermick. Try having their burrowers dig into your flesh until you can't even tell up from down."

Bile hit the back of Namir's throat.

"You try," The Master continued, leaning forwards, "being made into their goddamn slave." The Master leaned even closer. "I was there for two, whole, torturous years. I kept hoping that someone would realise I was there. That someone would do the right thing and pull me out of there. But no-one did. And then, one day, they picked me for their Jakten. Do you know what that is?"

Namir tried to shake his head; the word was unfamiliar to him. Thanks to whatever it was that The Master had done to him, though, he was unable to so much as twitch.

The Master grinned humourlessly. "No, of course you wouldn't. Jakten was the hunt. The Vermick would pick on someone and force that person to run from packs of their Ulvs -- ferocious, dog-like things that would rip you limb from limb. They called it sport." The Master turned on his heel and paced away. "They picked me and I ran. I had no choice. It was run or die." The Master swung back to face Namir once more. "It was run and die." Another humourless grin crossed The Master's face. "Destiny Force -- ya gotta love it."

~*~

Zaskin studied data on one of the computer screens. Faint sounds of battle drifted to him from somewhere outside. That meant things were coming to a head. Sooner or later, either he was going to be rescued or The Master was going to return and have him killed. Or worse.

He looked over at the stasis couch once more and the first germ of an escape plan occurred to him. Zaskin smiled.

~*~

Namir wondered, wildly, what The Master meant by that.

"Can't you guess?" The Master drawled, as if he was reading Namir's thoughts. "No, I'll bet your little naïve ass can't even conceive it." He chuckled. "Destiny Force pulled me through a time hole. It did what dear ol' dad should have done. It took me home. Except, it wasn't home. Because Alex Collins was long dead and I was a man without a place in the world."

A sick feeling stirred in Namir's stomach.

"So I decided I was going to make myself a place in the world," The Master continued, his voice once again rising in anger. "Your father left me there, in the past; in that hell. Fair's fair. And now, it's time to end it. Time to stop it from even happening."

Before Namir could even process that, The Master turned on his heel and started towards the door.

"Alpha: Follow!"

And Namir found himself mechanically following The Master out of the storeroom trap, along the hallway and into a big, open lab similar to the holograph that had disguised the store room. In fact, Namir realised, it was exactly like the holograph. There was a stasis couch, surrounded by a bank of benches and computers with someone apparently busily engaged in an experiment at the far end of the room; in fact, all it was missing was the stasis couch's occupant.

Even as Namir took that in, he heard The Master swear.

"Zaskin!" he roared.

The man, Zaskin, slowly turned from whatever he was doing. "Thought you'd be back; and with a little drone, too."

Despite knowing that Zaskin was probably referring to the clones, Namir couldn't help but feel inwardly outraged at that comment.

"You..." But The Master was apparently speechless.

Zaskin smiled coldly. "I can't do what you're asking me to do, and furthermore, I won't."

And then The Master pitched forwards as something solid connected with his head.

TO BE CONTINUED...