Chapter 27
Cold Underground

There was barely any light in that room. Everything was completely clad in metal, and the only other thing in the room was a metal elevator. It certainly wasn’t anything fancy. The door was comprised of three metal beams with caution tape and several black grates, all of which had taken abuse through the many years of service. I had made my way over to the control panel and pressed the button to call the elevator. I didn’t know why but something was certainly making me feel sick at that moment. It just seemed too quiet around here…

Soon enough, we saw the metal elevator rise through the grates, and when it had arrived at the top floor, the metal beams had slid into the ceiling and floor while the grates had been pulled to the sides. Inside was a very dark metal elevator, dimly lit by only a single, tiny light on the ceiling.

"Sure hope we know what we're doing here," Blitz muttered.

"It's a god-forsaken missile silo, what do you expect?" Rackal asked him, growing annoyed. "We're just here to disable the missiles so they don't decide to launch them rather than let them go to waste."

We had walked over to the elevator and stepped inside. Once we were all in, I pressed the black button on the side to head downward. Suddenly, the metal beams slid back down again, and the grates were pulled in front of us. Then, everything in front of us moved upward as the elevator moved downward, deeper into the ground below.

It felt like we had descended nearly a mile underground before we finally arrived at the bottom floor. Similar to the floor above, sliding metal beams made up the door. Once the beams and grates had been moved aside, we peered into another dark room, this time completely made of concrete. We had stepped out of the elevator, and looked around.

“Since there are two silo doors, there have to be two missiles,” Rackal had told us. “We need to place two explosive charges on the missiles themselves, as well as any fuel rooms we find. We don't know if they're going to launch them or not, but I know that if they knew there was a significant risk in losing them, they'd rather fire them off randomly and hope to hit something that belonged to the Silver Rebellion than to let them get destroyed. ”

Suddenly, we heard a noise in the distance. We quickly turned around and looked down a long concrete hallway, with a Nuzleaf and a Fraxure starting right at us with weapons drawn. They both glared at us.

“Silver Rebellion…” The Nuzleaf hissed at us. “I think the four of you fools just stepped a little too far into our hole.”

“Drop your weapons!” The Fraxure shouted angrily in a low voice as he pointed his large Vulcan rifle right at us, “Or you’ll find another way to kiss the floor!!”

“I’ve got a better idea,” Vice smiled with an insidious grin. “How about you get out of our way, and we might just spare your lives!”

The Fraxure growled at us, pointing the huge Vulcan rifle right at Vice. Meanwhile, the Nuzleaf was armed with what looked like a smaller machine pistol, almost like an Uzi. Both of them looked at Vice with contempt.

“I hope you’ve enjoyed your life here, you worthless, little Weavile,” The Nuzleaf hissed with amusement. “You enter the Abyss today!!”

And then, they opened fire on Vice. I felt for sure he was going to be killed unless I took action now. I had to concentrate, this time very hard. Suddenly, everything around me slowed to a crawl. The incoming bullets had very slowly approached Vice, and he moved back, just barely able to get out of the way in time.

I had stormed my way toward the Fraxure and the Nuzleaf, with my cheeks flaring with electricity. Vice just barely managed to get back up on his feet, having to drop his weapon in order to dodge the incoming carnage. He then leapt toward the Nuzleaf, and slashed viciously at his face. Meanwhile, I had jumped toward the Fraxure, latched on to his chest, and released all of my stored electricity all directed into Fraxure’s abdomen. His body began to twitch and convulse with throbbing pain as the thunderbolt surged into him, just before he slowly collapsed to the ground. While he fell, he almost looked like he had drowned underwater, and was sinking to the bottom of the sea, all in slow motion. When the Fraxure had completely collapsed to the ground, I had gotten off of him and turned to see Vice, cutting Nuzleaf into shreds. By now, Nuzleaf was long gone…

I had stopped my concentration, and everything returned to normal speed. Meanwhile, Vice had looked toward me, and then looked around him.

“Boy, that was fun,” Vice replied, crossing his arms with his soiled claws sticking out. “And you… you sure move fast for even a Pikachu. You almost make me jealous. Almost.”

“Yeah, I know,” Rackal replied, looking at me in particular. “I barely even had the chance to blink and Juno was tearing even that Fraxure apart.”

I didn’t say anything. I just looked into Vice’s eyes for a moment, and then looked away.

"Not surprised some think you really are the Gold Rider," Rackal told me, still amazed. "That didn't look like anything you were trained on."

“Come on,” I told them, not really in the mood to hear that whole prophecy story they had going on. “Let’s just do our job and get out of here, before anyone else sees us…”

They had agreed, and we had made our way down the dark, concrete tunnels. Once we had arrived at a metal, steel security door, we pressed a button on the side and the door opened. We had come to a small control room. There were computer consoles everywhere, as well as two glass windows on the left and right. When I looked through the windows, I could see both missiles, still docked in the silo. But I didn’t see any way Rackal could attach an explosive to the missile itself. There was no way for us to enter the chamber ourselves.

“Oh, damn…” Rackal sighed in anxiety as he looked around, “this isn’t the system that I thought it was…”

“What does that mean?” Blitz asked as the white, electric squirrel clutched his Scab anxiously, looking up at Rackal.

“It means we’re going to have to destroy these missiles some other way…”

I had looked at the consoles, and then at the rockets, and couldn’t think of what to do. Normally, we could set an explosive charge for ten minutes and get the heck out of there, but we couldn’t get anywhere near the rockets. We'd risk only destroying the control room.

“Well, what do we do?” Blitz asked, looking around, “The rocket is like two hundred feet away from the window. Even if we break it and tried tossing the bombs through there, they'd probably land in the wrong place…”

“There’s only one way we can get rid of them now,” Rackal told the three of us. “We need to launch them so they crash right into the silo door. Once they hit the door, chances are good they'll explode and everything here will be destroyed, along with the missiles themselves. Problem is, the longest amount of time that the launch can be set for is five minutes.”

Vice had looked away for a moment. He seemed pretty tense about something.

“You know, five minutes isn’t a whole lot of time for us to rush out of here,” Vice complained. “Once that countdown starts, we’d better run like hell if we hope to get away from that explosion. Keep in mind those silo doors aren’t going to hold in that explosion very well. They’ll kill the rocket, but after that, those silos are going to blow up like a freaking volcano.”

“We will make it out it time,” Rackal told us, trying to assure we'd be okay. “Once we reach the surface, we run as far as we can from the two silo doors. That’s all. We have no idea how much carnage is going to spit out of those silo holes once the explosion happens, but our own guarantee of safety is to get away from them as far as possible.”

“Okay, but I hope you know what you’re doing…” Vice told him, rolling his eyes.

Rackal had made his way over to the console, and began pressing a series of buttons. I had never seen a system like this in my life, so I had no clue myself how to use it…

“Manual system override…” Rackal said to himself as he hacked away at the buttons, “Administrator launch protocol… reconfigure…”

And then, some red lights turned on all around us. Along with them came on a female electronic voice:

LANUCH IN T-MINUS 300 SECONDS

“Come on!” Rackal shouted, turning around. “It’s set to go! We have to get out of here!”

We immediately turned around and ran out of the control room with my heart racing incredibly fast. I was leading with Vice right beside me, with Blitz right behind us and Rackal in the back. We ran furiously down the hallway when suddenly we had heard an alarm go off, and more flashing red lights turned on around the concrete hallway.

UNAUTHORIZED LAUNCH SEQUENCE DETECTED. INITIATING SILO LOCKDOWN.

We had seen the two open steel doors in front of us, and quickly Vice and I had passed through them with Blitz directly behind us. The three of us had made it through, but then as we turned around and saw Rackal just feet away from the door, the two metal doors furiously slammed shut all of a sudden, trapping Rackal inside…

Recommended Listening: XCOM Enemy Unknown OST - Mission Failure

“Damn it, damn it, damn it.” Vice spat bitterly, immediately trying to pry the two doors open to free Rackal. "Come on, come on, open for crying out loud."

The doors were quite thick and heavy. Despite Vice's claws and aggression, it seemed like there wasn't much he could do on his own to pry the doors open.

“Damn it, those things aren’t going to open…!” Vice muttered, realizing the strength of the doors was well out of his league. "I can't even get them to budge."

I headed over to the black button that opened the door and pressed it furiously, but it wasn’t doing anything at all. Everything was totally locked down, and once again, the loud speaker came on…

LAUNCH IN T-MINUS 200 SECONDS

“How do we get this damn thing open!?” Blitz shouted furiously, pounding at the metal doors.

“That’s the problem…” Vice told us anxiously. “It was a backup security measure that activated when the system detected an unauthorized launch code. The Crimsons Stars love to pull this asinine bullcrap. There's nothing we can do. Rackal is a goner…”

No… there had to be some way to get him out of there. I tried focusing my mind but even that couldn’t help. Despite all of Juno's powers, any kind of telekinesis wasn't on the list. The doors were far too heavy and the control panel simply wasn’t working…

“No, this cannot be happening!” I shouted as I pounded the black button harder and harder. “There’s got to be something we can do to get him out of there!”

“Come on!” Vice shouted to the two of us, “If we stay here any longer we’re going to fry in here as well. We don’t have any more time!!”

We couldn’t help but leave Rackal behind, even though it made me so sick to leave him trapped in there to die. We turned around and followed Vice down the concrete hallways. Meanwhile, I couldn’t believe I had lost another member of my team. We had made it to the elevator, and pressed the call button, which thankfully still worked. Immediately, the doors opened, we dashed inside, and pressed the button. The doors shut tightly and the elevator began to climb upward, the last travel it would ever make…

LAUNCH IN T-MINUS 100 SECONDS

We had made it to the top floor, and we furiously headed for the metal door. Once we were outside, we ran as far away from that silo as we could, since the whole thing was about to explode. As we kept on running, I had seen that the Crimson Stars were unable to douse the fire that was quickly consuming the warehouses one by one. But meanwhile, we were running in an open field, completely without cover. But even at that moment, that wasn’t what was bothering me…

Suddenly, moments later, the ground shook like a massive earthquake had taken place. I had turned around for just a moment and saw the two silo doors blast off with a massive gush of fire and flames following it. One of the metal doors had fallen back toward the ground and slammed into an already burning warehouse, just to assist in the destruction. Despite the fact we were doing a massive amount of damage to Macomb, I still felt so sick at that moment…

I’m sorry, Rackal…