Plot
Major Reeves, a rocket expert and friend to Colonel White, has been touring Cloudbase. As Reeves returns to Base Concord by ship, Captain Black uses the Mysteron influence to nauseate him and the Major falls into the sea and drowns when a side rail collapses. A Mysteron reconstruction of Reeves arrives at Base Concord and takes over the launch control room, shooting the officer on duty, priming an incendiary Variable Geometry Rocket and launching it under the code "ZERO". Reeves escapes from Base Concord in a J17 interceptor with the Flight Program Unit, with the result that personnel do not know where the VGR will strike, nor which code out of the 10,000 listed in the Base Concord manual is required to remote-activate its self-destruct mechanism. Curiously, the VGR is also not registering on ground radar. The Base Concord Commander contacts Cloudbase and Captains Scarlet and Blue are dispatched, while the Angels are launched to start a search for the J17. Reeves is soon located but refuses to surrender the Flight Program Unit, crippling Melody Angel with the J17's machine gun and forcing her to eject before her aircraft crashes into the ocean.
At Base Concord, it is realised that the VGR would be invisible to radar only if it were moving on a vertical ascent and descent flightpath, leaving Base Concord itself as the only possible target. With a replacement Flight Program Unit, personnel start to test self-destruct codes in alphabetical order despite the impossible odds. Elsewhere, Rhapsody Angel orders Reeves to surrender, but the Mysteron agent deliberately crashes the J17, sending the original Flight Program Unit to the ocean floor. With three minutes to impact, and all the Base Concord personnel evacuated, White commands Scarlet and Blue to leave. However, the officers ignore orders in a daredevil bid to hit on the correct self-destruct code. The apt "AMEN" proves unsuccessful, but on the seabed, the Flight Program Unit is dislodged from a rock and the self-destruct is activated. By a stroke of fate, the VGR detonates and Base Concord is saved. White is furious with his officers' conduct, but rules out a court-martial because valour is essential in Earth's war with the Mysterons.
Read more about this topic: Renegade Rocket
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““The plot thickens,” he said, as I entered.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)