Power Rangers Chronic Storm 1: The Axis of Power

Chapter 10: Resistance

Ethan, Taylor, and Kendrix tracked Carter and Jason's movements from the Astro4 bridge. But once the pair had been captured, their Morpher signatures wiped off the screen, disabling all communication.

A perplexed Ethan nervously tapped on buttons, trying to make the systems respond.

"What's going on?" Taylor turned towards Ethan. "Fix it!"

"Working on that! This isn't exactly 21st-century tech. I can only do so much."

Kendrix somberly shook her head. "Both Carter and Jason's Morphers have gone offline. I don't think they have them anymore."

"Then we're going in after them." Taylor rushed out of the bridge.

The Triforian ship lifted up as its thrusters flashed a bright white light before she even made it to the door. The vessel launched into hyper speed and disappeared into the void of space, leaving only a momentary blue, lighting-like crack from its leap across the cosmos.

The trio of remaining Rangers was left with expressions as blank as the black, empty view that now greeted them.

"Carter! Jason! Come in!" Ethan pounded the computer keys, desperately trying to re-establish communications. Nothing would respond.

Taylor walked up to the front of the bridge and intently stared out the front windows. "We have to go after that ship!" She turned to Ethan. "We still have your algorithm, right? We can still use it to track them down."

"Yeah, that's the easy part," Ethan replied. "The real problem comes after. How are we going to save Carter, Jason, and the Queen? If we get too close, they'll shoot us down on the spot. And they could have done that before now if they weren't just playing around with us."

"Maybe we're looking at this in the wrong way." Kendrix thought about some of the communications she picked up from Axis and his crew. "Maybe if we can figure out how the launch system in the cell blocks work, we can have them come to us."

"Forced ejection." Taylor slowly nodded. "Can we do that?"

Ethan tightly pressed his lips while he shook his head. "There's no way we're getting into their systems again. You heard the creepy alien dude, they basically held the door open for us this time. But now, they'll encrypt their ship's tech with more code than we can decrypt before alerting them to what we're up to. And that's assuming that decrypting anything even works in the future."

"We should talk to Professor Knox," Kendrix added. "He's got to know a lot more than us time travel tourists ever could. Maybe he can figure out a way to sneak past their defenses."

Taylor sighed and shook her head. "That kid is a real piece of work... All that training went right to his head."

"Huh," Ethan remarked. "So this time, you encouraged the kid?"

Taylor slowly turned around and glared at him. "Does this really feel like the time for one of your insufferable, sarcastic remarks?"

"Not really sarcasm if it's true," mumbled Ethan under his breath.

Taylor marched toward Ethan with a menacing scowl, but Kendrix got in between the two. "I get it, we're all on edge right now. But if we fight amongst ourselves, we won't save anyone. Let's just head back to Earth and figure out our next move, okay?"

Taylor crossed her arms and made her way towards the Astro4's controls. "Fine."

"Fine." Ethan threw his hands in the air and tried to do what we could from his computer.

Taylor began plotting a route back to Earth, but ran into trouble inputting the coordinates properly. She tried the same sequence of inputs again only to come up with another red error message accompanied by an irritating buzzing sound. She clenched her fists as her frustration boiled over.