Disclaimer: This season, that season, or three seasons from now, Saban will still own the Power Rangers. “Emma Jean’s Guitar” is by Chely Wright from her album Let Me In. It has no bearing on the story. I just found some amount of inspiration in it. :)

Author’s Note: This is *not* a sequel to After Space, though it does contain many elements of After Space in it. Why? ‘Cause I wanted to put them there. *grin* This is also *not* a PRLG story, though it features a PRLG character. Why? ‘Cause he isn’t the main character. For further information on that subject, you must read below. *grin* I would like to state my opinion here though, and this is just that, my opinion and nothing else. Despite the fact that I *do* like the series, I feel that the PRLG Rangers do not deserve or appreciate the MegaShip. Thanks for listening. :) Thanks to Blue for answering my questions. And thanks to Starhawk for proofing and sighing. :)

The MegaShip was always so… silent. He knew that it couldn’t have always been that way. Somehow he got the distinct impression that it was used to being filled with sounds. Whether laughter of a group or the tears of a lonely individual, there had always been some life, some sound. It couldn’t have ever been this silent. It seemed wrong somehow.

Damon was always struck by that feeling when he was aboard the MegaShip. He was on his way to make some routine repairs in the holding bay when he felt it again. That familiar tickling that something was missing… that the heart of the ship was gone.

He had never been prone to picking up on odd sensations and such, not like Maya did. She seemed to be able to pick up on the subtlest things, the smallest sensations; of things that were wrong, or out of place, or just able perceive things that were beyond the rest of them. Damon wasn’t like her and he couldn’t explain it, but he felt something every time he came on board. It was as if the ship was speaking to him. And he knew that the present ‘crew’ was not whom the MegaShip wanted.

When he alone had first been given the job to repair and preserve the MegaShip as a museum, he was thrilled. Here was his chance to work on a starship the likes of which few humans had ever seen. And he loved to be able to work on it by himself. Damon felt rather selfish in his desire to be the first to unearth the mysteries of the MegaShip’s inner mechanisms. He relished the idea of tinkering with the various systems to determine what could make a starship like that run, to strip things down to their basic components just to see what made them tick. He ran over in his mind his ideas for upgrades and changes for weeks before he finally took his first excited step onto the ramp that would lead him into the great ship.

From the moment he first stepped on board he knew he would not be welcome. A cold chill, like a blast of arctic air greeted him. It wasn’t just a faulty climate control system. The chill felt unnatural, a warning to him to leave alone things he would never understand.

And from that first moment his grand plans to renovate and experiment on the MegaShip were gone. Instead he was intrigued by the feeling that emanated from the ship itself. He began exploring it, top to bottom, trying to discover why the ship felt so hollow.

Damon knew there was a sentient computer on board that ran most of the MegaShip’s higher functions, but DECA (as he discovered she was called) must have deemed him unworthy of her time. She never saw fit to talk to him, no matter how often or politely he tried to question her.

The robot on board, Alpha VI greeted him no less coldly than the DECA or the ship itself did. Alpha felt inclined to answer any questions Damon saw fit to ask about the mechanics of the MegaShip, but refused to comment on the past at all. But the feeling of emptiness didn’t come from DECA or Alpha. He knew he would sound crazy if he ever tried to tell anyone, but it came from the ship. With no help from either DECA or Alpha, the mystery of the emptiness of the ship was Damon’s alone to decipher.

His explorations showed him technical wonders far in advance of modern Earth systems. But at every new discovery he found himself distracted by things small but significant; things he had overlooked at first. Where things seemed perfectly normal, on second glance usually revealed some sign of the life that used to exist there.

From news reports he knew that there had been six AstroRangers. But those same news reports had also said that eight people had been seen disembarking from the MegaShip at various times since it landed on Earth after the end of the war. Then under the constant scrutiny of the press and the undivided attention of a thankful world, all eight crewmembers had mysteriously disappeared. Their identities having been revealed in the final battle, Damon reasoned that they had left to escape their unwanted popularity. But still the math of ‘six’ and ‘eight’ did not add up with the clues he discovered left behind.

On deck five he had found the sleeping quarters. There were ten rooms, six of which were decorated in the AstroRangers’ colors: red, yellow, pink, blue, black, and silver. The seventh room was decorated in a soft purple. The remaining three rooms for all practical purposes looked totally uninhabited, as if no one had ever lived in any of them. The three rooms all bore the standard colors of the MegaShip’s interior, each room identical to the rest.

That made seven rooms for eight people. So Damon figured either the eighth crewmember never slept, or he or she was bunking with someone else. All the rooms did have bunk beds after all. Though the rooms were all cleaned spotless, making it impossible to tell exactly how many people had been in each room. It was upon his closer inspection that he discovered his clues, his signs from the past.

Each crewmember had left behind something in their room, something to mark their time there it seemed. In the ‘blue room’ and the ‘black room’ he found a baseball and soccer ball, respectively. Damon felt sure if he looked at all the expose articles done on the known ‘Earth Rangers’ of the Astro team, he would discover that the Blue and Black AstroRangers had been sports stars. The same held for the Yellow AstroRanger, as he believed she was a cheerleader, judging from what he found in her room: a set of pompoms in the colors of the local high school, Angel Grove High.

The remaining ‘colored rooms’ were not as easy to figure out. In the ‘pink room’ he found a group of items laying in the windowseat. They were a broken audio tape, a crumpled picture, and a strange cylinder-shaped device. The device made no sense at all until after he became a Ranger. As Damon and the other new Rangers slowly learned about their newfound powers, he decided that the device must have been triggered to be activated by the ‘Power signatures’ that Alpha kept mentioning to them. Because the next time he entered the pink room, the strange device activated on its own.

It sprang to life, projecting on the windowseat the image of a man wearing black armor. He was in obvious pain as he spoke to the AstroRangers about tracking someone named Zordon. That image faded away as the message ended. The device sprang to life a second time only a moment later. This time the man in armor spoke what was most likely meant to be a private message to a Cassie. He recognized the name as being one of the ‘Earth Rangers’ on the Astro team. Damon watched as the man asked her not to forget him, his image mirrored in the glass of the window behind the seat. Then that image faded too, leaving a blinking red light on the device that would not stop.

There had to be a third message he thought, but nothing he did would make it play. The final message must have truly been a private message, triggered only by her Power signature in particular. The crumpled picture was of the Pink AstroRanger and the man in armor together in a jungle. They seemed quite close as she supported him and he leaned against her. Damon hoped the two had found each other after the war. And he realized that they probably had, as that would explain at least one of the two extra crewmembers.

The ‘silver room’ was equally as confusing. In it, lying in front of the mirror on the dresser, he found a burnt and charred stem from a long stemmed rose. At least he thought it had been a rose. The stem was long and straight with thorns growing out of it here and there, but the flower itself was long gone. The only parts of the stem not burnt were four small oblong patches running horizontally on one side. Those patches pestered Damon endlessly, nagging at his mind for explanation. In the dark of night as he tried to go to sleep, he would remember those patches and he would find himself lying there, staring at the ceiling and trying once again to figure out why they were there.

One night an idea finally occurred to him and he had to go back to the MegaShip, despite the lateness of the hour, just to get another look at the stem. He had entered the room and picked up the stem carefully, not wanting to damage it any further. He wrapped his fingers carefully around it, as if he was holding a bouquet. His fingers fell onto the unburned patches on the stem. His hand was slightly larger than the Silver AstroRanger’s hand was, but otherwise it lined up. The Silver Ranger must have been holding a bouquet when he and or it was blasted somehow. The unburned patches were where his fingers had been resting. And judging from the degree of the burns on the stem, the Silver Ranger must have gotten quite a nasty burn himself. Damon had placed the stem carefully back in front of the mirror, hoping that whomever the flowers had been for had been worth it. And she had to have been, he thought, since the Silver Ranger had kept the stem.

The ‘purple room’ had finally made sense once he figured out the silver room’s secret of the stem. Or, rather, the room made partial sense at least. For in this room in a dark corner on the floor he found another burnt rose stem and a crown. The rose stem had the same unburned patches, marking it as coming from the same bouquet, and convincing Damon that the inhabitant of the purple room had been the intended recipient of the burnt bouquet. The crown left him puzzled though. It was a simple metal circlet with bangles hanging from one side but he had no clue as to its meaning.

But it was the ‘red room’ that captivated him the most. There was something about that room, something about the person who had lived there… it made Damon want to discover whatever he could about the Red AstroRanger. It wasn’t anything he found in the room itself; it was the feeling that he got from the room. There was a prevailing loneliness that filled it. He suspected that the Red AstroRanger had spent many years alone. There was pain in that room, a darkness that came from great loss. And at the same time Damon felt a ‘lightening’ that came with new friendships and restored hope. But the feelings that came from the room were deeper than that in some way. It was as if the MegaShip itself missed this crewmember more than any other, as if the Red AstroRanger had been the ship’s only friend.

He had searched the red room several times and found nothing. He had begun to believe that the Red AstroRanger was a tremendously private and shy individual. And then he finally found it, the Red Ranger’s link to the past. Lying under the pillow was a video disc. Damon’s curiosity about the Red Ranger flared up again as he set the disc in the player. But it wouldn’t run. So he took it to another room and another and another, but no player on the MegaShip would run the disc.

He assumed it was DECA’s doing that he couldn’t get the disc to play. He briefly considered taking the disc off the ship and running it elsewhere. But he had never taken any of the items off the ship, and if DECA was going through that much trouble to prevent him from seeing it, he thought maybe he should respect her wishes. It did make him wonder why the Red Ranger had left it behind, if he didn’t want others to see it. He supposed that it contained something that brought back bad memories, that he did not want near him any longer, but did not have the heart to destroy.

Damon had found other things in other rooms too. Things that weren’t quite as private or personal, but signs none-the-less of how the AstroRangers had lived and loved on the MegaShip.

While working on the waste disposal system, he found one port that contained a jam of some sort. It took some time to clear away what had built up behind and around it, but he finally discovered what had caused the jam in the first place. It was a small figurine of a boy and a girl that had a music box in its base.

Once it was cleaned up it was very pretty, and he wondered why anyone would have thrown it away. He had taken it to put it on the dresser in the yellow room, next to the pompoms. He didn’t know why, but the music box just felt ‘yellow’. As he set it on the dresser he heard a sound coming from the hallway. Alpha had seen him setting it down, and if Damon hadn’t known it wasn’t possible, he would have sworn the robot was smiling at him. At least Alpha seemed to be smiling from the cock of his head and the small laugh he let out before shuffling away.

He found an observatory on the uppermost level. That surprised him just because he never thought of a battleship needing an observatory. He took it as a sign that despite their long struggle, they had not been hardened by the war and were still children at heart, able to enjoy the simpler things in life such as the beauty of the stars. And apparently they also enjoyed Monopoly, as he found a board set out in front of the couch there. The Chance and Community Chests cards were neatly stacked in their spots and there were eight stacks of money, counted out to the appropriate amount. There were eight game pieces, all of them lined up at Go. The board was set up like it was waiting for one last game.

He found a room that Alpha called the simudeck. Damon thought it reminded him exactly of the holodeck on Star Trek. He found dozens of programs, some of them general that anyone would enjoy. Others were very specific, probably designed by one of the Rangers for themselves. He found one named “agpark”, and opened it out of curiosity to see if it was of Angel Grove Park. And it was the park, the one near the high school, down to the smallest detail. He hadn’t walked very far into the simulated park before he saw some sort of distortion, like ripples in time and space. Out of it appeared the man in black armor he had seen in the image and picture in the pink room. Since Damon was obviously not who he was searching for, the armored man disappeared just as quickly.

In the hangar bay where the Galaxy Rangers stored their Jet Jammers, Damon discovered a single set of scorch marks off to the side. It looked like a small starfighter had landed there once, and only once. And now it was gone. Again he wondered what the one time docking of a starfighter might have had to do with the two extra crewmembers.

It was totally by accident that he stumbled across the hidden room located off the side of the engine room. The door was well out of sight in a dark corner, and was not readily seen. He happened across it only because he was trying to trace a faulty circuit reading he was getting from there. Strangely his readouts told him that the problem circuits were in the next room, and he didn’t think there was one till he found the door panel.

When the door slid open, at first all he noticed was the darkness and the absence of any lighting that he could turn on. He stumbled his way forward toward the one light source, an eerie glow that came from a device he had never seen before. It seemed to be intact, except that the controls were smashed. He didn’t even realize he had said anything out loud until he heard the response.

When he had discovered that no one would talk to him, he had taken to talking to himself, purely for the fun of it, knowing he would not receive a response. It was out of that habit that he muttered something about what the heck was that thing. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard DECA’s voice then for the very first time.

She informed him that it was a hypersleep chamber and with some questioning she informed him of its function and the principle behind its design. When he asked why the controls were smashed, she refused to say. But Damon had a funny feeling that someone didn’t want it used again. He decided to repair it anyway, thinking that one never knew when something like that would be needed.

But his favorite room on the MegaShip was the holding bay. He didn’t know it was called that at first. He didn’t know anything about it in fact. But he was fascinated by the things he found there. There was a section of the room that was higher than the rest, and was accessible by a set of stairs. Set in the wall were five holes, each the color of one of the AstroRangers. Alpha informed him that they were called ‘jump tubes’, and that they were used as access to the Galaxy Gliders. Encouraged by Alpha’s sudden desire to share information, he inquired as to why the Silver AstroRanger didn’t have a jump tube. But Alpha again became silent, and Damon knew he had gone too far in asking about the past.

In the holding bay he also found the synthetron. Near it was a small, high table with eight stools clustered around it. He guessed correctly that it was a food simulator, but no matter what he ordered the synthetron gave him the wrong food. He tried taking it apart to locate the problem before he finally realized it was DECA’s way of playing with him. Her camera blinked at him, but she didn’t speak. Alpha seemed to find it quite funny also. And Damon had to laugh too, if for no other reason than he felt better knowing that at least they weren’t ignoring his presence any more.

From then on DECA spoke to him on occasion, answering questions about the ship’s systems and generally giving Damon the opinion that she thought very highly of herself, and very little of others. Things were falling into a great little routine with Damon arriving everyday to repair and perform preventative maintenance on various systems and Alpha and DECA helping where he needed it.

Both the robot and the computer seemed to acknowledge the fact that Damon finally knew and understood what was going on. They knew that through his explorations Damon had discovered the secret of the MegaShip. He knew the reason it was so silent.

He also knew the boundaries of what was acceptable to the ship, and he did his best to ensure that his fellow Rangers stuck by them too. Though he didn’t know how he could ever begin to explain it to them. Instead there were certain sections of the MegaShip that he closed off, locked away from prying eyes that wouldn’t understand. It wasn’t like any of the other Rangers cared about the MegaShip anyway. The only rooms they ever visited were the Bridge, the hangar bay to get their Jet Jammers, and the medical bay since Leo spent so much time there.

He was in the holding bay making repairs to an auxiliary scanner console when his communicator went off, disturbing his thoughts. Leo had sent out a call to the Galaxy Rangers. There was trouble somewhere in Terra Venture. He put his tools aside, leaving the repairs for another day. He stood and looked wistfully around the holding bay, his eyes falling on the small high table surrounded by the eight stools. The table was obviously too small for that many people, as the stools themselves were crowded close together, seemingly jostling for a position nearer the table. To him this was just further proof that the former crew had to be more of a family than friends to enjoy that kind of closeness. He paused long enough to run his hand over the eight names that someone had lasered into the table’s once smooth surface.

Those names reminded him of an old movie he had seen, Red Dawn, in which the United States was attacked and a terrible war broke out on American soil, and a group of teenage rebels fought and died heroically, dropping any semblance of a normal life to defend their country. The teenagers had carved the names of their fallen into a rock on the side of a mountain. After the war, the rock had been discovered and declared a national monument. He felt the same way about the names lasered into the table. He had steadfastly refused to get rid of them.

On his explorations he had been drawn to that room, to that table. Upon finding the names, he finally knew then the MegaShip’s secret, what it was missing, why its heart was gone. It was as if the ship itself was mourning its absent crew.

He reached for his morpher to teleport out, wondering briefly how many times the bearers of those eight names had answered similar calls. Had their communicators rung out in that very room? Interrupting their meals? Conversations gone unfinished when evil called? As he was enveloped in his green light of teleportation, he knew he would never know for sure. Because…

The MegaShip was always so… silent.