Outside, the Enforcers were licking their wounds after the thrashing Street had given them. A few were tending to the commando who'd been flung against the side of the car earlier. Wrecked vehicles lay strewn about the power plant lot. Suddenly, they heard alarms and a computerized voice being announced via external speakers.
"Radiation leakage at dangerous high level! Meltdown imminent!"
Nearby, Murdoch sat up, very confused. The last thing he remembered was telling his fellow prisoners that Megakat Swamp would be a good place to hide from the Enforcers. Now they were nowhere to be found, and he had two holes torn in the back of his shirt he couldn't account for... and the very Enforcers he'd sought to escape were mere yards away! Fortunately for him, they didn't seem to be in any condition to bother stopping him if he attempted to run. And, indeed, upon that announcement over the PA, he gasped, got to his feet and ran off. Nobody noticed or bothered stopping him.
Peterson, the atomic engineer, came hurrying out of the building through a side entrance used by plant personnel in case of emergency. Feral glowered. It was obvious that the plan to shut down the reactor had failed. Peterson confirmed it when he came slowly jogging up in his full lead-lined suit, which seemed unnecessary given the alarms and announcements. He pulled off the suit's hood, panting and sweating. "Commander," he said, "I wasn't able to finish the shutdown procedure. I'm sorry, I didn't expect-"
"Neither did I," Feral admitted, cutting him off, not wanting to hear Peterson's excuses, figuring the engineer had fled upon seeing Street's new look. He was angry, but the time for blame could be assigned later, if later ever came.
"Radiation leakage at dangerous high level! Meltdown imminent!" the voice on the PA repeated.
"Evacuate the area, men!" Feral yelled. The Enforcers and power plant personnel began to flee, some in vehicles, some on foot. Time to issue a citywide evacuation order, Feral realized, reaching inside his greatcoat and taking out an Enforcer-issue communicator. It linked him directly to Headquarters' main control room. "This is Feral!" he bellowed. "Initiate Evacuation Code N-9305! I want all civilians and Enforcer personnel out of the city immediately to the minimum safe distance! Just in case!" Without giving the technician who'd answered his call time to reply, he lowered the communicator from his mouth.
Sergeant Talon walked up. "'Just in case?' Sir, you sound somewhat confident the SWAT Kats might just pull this off..." He sounded skeptical.
"I am. I have to be. Because the alternative is just giving up."
Determined to help the SWAT Kats in some way, Felina ran for an Enforcer chopper sitting on the ground which had been left untouched by Street's rampage, clambering in. Gray Taylor was at the controls. "Get this thing in the air! We have to go help the SWAT Kats!" she said, sitting in the co-pilot's seat. She smirked. "And maybe you can get a little revenge against that big bug."
Reflexively rubbing where he'd been bitten before, Gray flicked some switches. The rotor blades fired up and the aircraft lifted off.
At first, Feral didn't think anything of it, until the chopper flew towards the power plant and not away from it. Into his communicator, he yelled, "This is Commander Feral! Lieutenant, what are you doing?"
"What else?" came his niece's voice through the receiver. "Helping the SWAT Kats avert meltdown!"
"Felina!" the enraged Enforcer Commander bellowed.
"Sorry, Uncle." Felina sounded grimly resolved.
Feral only got angrier. "Felina, come back here!" Getting no response, he tried a different tactic. "Corporal Taylor, this is Commander Feral! I order you to fly back here at once!" Still no answer. Either they were ignoring him or they'd simply turned off the radio. "Oooh, that niece of mine is teaching that academy rookie some very bad habits." Slowly, his anger subsided and he turned to Sergeant Talon. "Let's get out of here."
"But what about the Lieutenant?" Talon demanded anxiously.
That worried Feral; he couldn't remember the last him his top sergeant had ever been anxious or afraid. And that made him anxious, too. And afraid. Not just for the city, but for Felina. He turned and watched his niece's chopper flying towards the power plant. "She'll succeed. She has to. Because if Lieutenant Feral and the SWAT Kats can't stop that monster bug... then no one can. Now come on, let's go!"
They got into Feral's cruiser and sped off.
Slightly encumbered by the heavy radiation-proof suits, the SWAT Kats ran through the deserted plant, pursued relentlessly by the blaring alarms and flashing red lights. T-Bone was in the lead. Even though it was Razor's idea, he, being bigger and stronger, moved faster in the weighted lead-lined suit. But his slimmer partner was no slouch; hours of training in the salvage yard's obstacle course helped keep the deceptively skinny-looking tom toned enough that he was able to keep up with T-Bone, even if he did fall slightly behind.
Every so often, panting audibly, their breath fogging the faceplates of the hoods, the two SWAT Kats would pause to look at the signs, helpfully accompanied by arrows, that the power plant staff had put up everywhere. They needed to get to one of the plant's cooling towers. It didn't take long, which was fortunate, because time was a luxury they didn't really have. Finally, they reached a security checkpoint - unmanned, of course - that read "Cooling Tower A - No Admittance." There were a set of double doors behind a glass panel opposite the guard station.
"Here we go!" said Razor.
He grabbed the chair behind the desk at the guard station and flung it. Crash! It shattered the glass partition, and a new jangle of alarms, which he and T-Bone ignored, joined the cacophony.
"In here!" Rushing forward, Razor jiggled the pushbar and shoved. "Locked!"
There was a keycard reader, but, obviously, neither he nor T-Bone had security clearance, and there was no time to hack in. He smirked a bit. He'd done this dance before. He tried to lift a leg to kick the doors open, found the suit wouldn't let him, and frowned, flinging himself shoulder-first into the doors. Pain shot through his shoulder and the doors stubbornly remained shut and locked. A hand clamped on his shoulder and he turned.
"Allow me!" said T-Bone, and flung himself forward with all his might like a football player. The doors burst open on the first try, swinging inward. "Unlocked!" he said triumphantly, and gestured. "Brains before beauty, buddy! This is your plan, after all!"
Ignoring the twinge of annoyance he felt at his friend showing him up, Razor went in. The cooling tower interior was vast, with slightly inclined walls sloping up towards the open top. Hearing whirring rotor blades, the SWAT Kats watched an Enforcer chopper fly overhead, before Razor's attention turned to a large outlet pipe on the far side of the room. He ran over as quickly as his radiation suit would allow. The pipe was enormous, sealed with a hinged, riveted door with a valve handle. A sign beside it informed the reader of the pipe's purpose and some small print legalese signed by plant management stipulated severe consequences for employees who opened the pipe in any event except for an emergency. Razor grinned. This was what he wanted. This was Megakat City's salvation. He hoped.
He turned to T-Bone, who stood waiting with his hands on his hips in the middle of the room. "This pipe leads directly to Megakat Bay! It's where the plant gets its water from!" he said.
T-Bone frowned, but quickly understood his friend's plan a little better now. He knew the plant was by the ocean. Open the pipe, flood the plant. Drown the nuclear fire before it got too hot and melted the whole place down. He gave Razor a thumbs-up. "Good thinkin'! We'll put out the reactor before it melts down and hopefully drown Dr. Bug-Eyes once and for all while we're at it!"
He ran over, and, together, he and Razor began attempting to turn the massive valve.
"Remember!" said Razor, grunting and sweating inside the suit. "Lefty loosey, righty tighty!"
"I know, I know!" gasped T-Bone, also grunting. "We're both mechanics!"
Try as they might, though, the valve stubbornly refused to budge more than a few inches. Evidently, the staff hadn't had to open it in a while. Up above, that Enforcer chopper reappeared. Inside, Felina Feral and Gray Taylor watched the two SWAT Kats wrestling with the valve. It took Felina a moment to realize what they were doing, before she too understood what their plan was and grinned.
Beside her, Gray Taylor remained puzzled. "What are they doing?" he asked.
"I think I know!" she reached inside her pocket, felt the gloved tips of her fingers touch the communicator T-Bone had given her back during the Katrina Moorkroft debacle, hesitating. Should she reveal her secret to the other Enforcer? She frowned. Better contact the vigilantes through normal channels. She activated the chopper's loudspeaker. "SWAT Kats!" she said into the helmet's microphone. Her voice echoed down through the cooling tower interior. The two radiation-suited vigilantes flinched as the tower's acoustics amplified her voice. She winced, but kept talking anyway. Her friends' comfort was of minor concern to her right now, with the entire city at stake. "This is Lieutenant Feral! I know what you're trying to do! Stand back! Get clear of the pipe and we'll blast it open!"
Down below, the slimmer of the two figures - Razor - gave a little salute to signal that they understood, while the other - T-Bone - shook his fist up at the hovering helicopter to show his displeasure at nearly having his eardrums blown out, and then the two ran from the tower, back through the double doors they'd entered through. Once they were safely out of the way, Felina flicked a switch. A targeting scope swiveled into place and she sighted the pipe cover through it, focusing her crosshairs on the valve handle in particular. Although he still didn't seem to understand what was happening, Gray, to his credit, trusted his superior's judgment, and kept the aircraft steady, and didn't pester Felina with any questions.
Whoosh! Felina fired. A missile flew down and blasted the valve handle and the cover - and much of the pipe and surrounding wall - into nonexistence, and Megakat Bay began rushing in. Beside her, Gray gave a cry of excitement and understanding as he finally got what they were doing.
"That water will hopefully flood the power plant and cool down the breached reactor!" Felina explained.
Gray nodded, then frowned. "But what about the SWAT Kats? We can't just leave them to drown."
"And we're not gonna!" said Felina, unbuckling her seatbelt and pushing the targeting scope back into place. She moved into the rear of the chopper, slid open the side door and knelt down, preparing the rescue ladder for lowering. "Lower us down inside the cooling tower as far as you can!"
Meanwhile, in the reactor room, the black, glistening, horribly beautiful thing that had once been Dr. Harley Street, the scarab, munched away happily on the fuel rods he wrenched free from the smashed open reactor, growing bigger with each bite he took, completely unaware of what was happening elsewhere in the building. Unaware, that is, until a torrent of water began gushing into the room. At first he ignored it. A burst pipe someplace. Until the unmistakable smell of the ocean made his antennae go berserk. Saltwater! The ocean! Megakat Bay! A pipe had been burst, all right, he realized... the pipe leading from one of the cooling towers to the sea! Rage filled him, a fury like nothing he'd ever experienced! Already, as the water level rose up over the base of the reactor pedestal - knee-deep for him now - the glow of the fuel rods was beginning to fade.
His worst fears were confirmed when the voice announced over the P.A., "Attention! Attention! Critical radiation leakage levels lowering!"
"Cuuuurse you, SWAT Kats!" Street howled in anger, and stomped from the room. He had to find the source of the water and stop it. The cooling towers! Yes! He had to get to the cooling towers and stop the flow of ocean water before it completely drowned the reactor and ruined all his plans. Failing that, his dream of an irradiated Ci-Kat-A paradise fading from his vision even faster than the rising waters of Megakat Bay filling the power plant interior, Street vowed that the two meddling vigilantes who'd killed his beloved queen, taken Ann Gora from him, and dashed his dreams, would pay for all of it with their lives. Clenching and unclenching his clawed hands, he stomped down the hall towards the cooling tower, fighting against the onrushing torrent of seawater.
