" " ' Inside the silo, the smoke was thick enough to make it difficult to see or even breathe, let alone do enough damage to stop the missile. The hatch at the top of the underground silo was already open. Under the circumstances, the clear, blue sky that showed through the open hatch seemed less hopeful than ominous. Freefall floated above the worst of the smoke as she poured her strength into the strongest gravity field that she’d ever created. The missile’s natural weight already tipped the scale at approximately 130,000 pounds. Freefall strained to multiply that, hoping beyond hope that it would be more than the missile’s rockets could bear. Already, the only one who could bear the heat at the bottom of the silo was Burnout. He’d realized that, with the casing of the missile designed to withstand the heat of reentry, his own flame would have little chance of melting through. Instead, he added his superheated plasma to the existing heat of the jets, in the hopes that the combined temperature would be enough to fuse them shut, or at least do enough damage to prevent an effective launch.
