Colleen, Penny, Bolt, and Blitz in the Street Rover, with Shag and Exile on a motorcycle.

“Where are we going, anyway?” asked Penny.

“I dunno,” Colleen admitted. “Hunter, where are we going?”

“We know those guys are after Penny and Bolt,” Hunter replied. “And we know they know they're with us. So we just have to wait until they come and find us. We chase them off, they go back home...”

“...and we follow them right back to their headquarters,” finished Penny.

Hunter nodded.

It didn't take long for them to get their wish. Soon the familiar throb of helicopter rotors could be heard overhead, followed by the revving of motorcycles pursuing them on land. One pulled up alongside Blitz's window, and Blitz rolled it down, sticking his arm out with claws extended toward the front tire.

“Here, let me give you a- GAAAH!” The rider zapped him with an electrified gauntlet, forcing him to pull back the offended appendage. Colleen opened the sunroof, rose to a standing position on her seat, and blasted the ninja's motorcycle out from under him.

Bolt, meanwhile, was pawing at Penny's window. She turned to see another tech-ninja coming up on their side. Smiling, she pressed the button to lower the window. “Go get 'em, Bolt,” she smirked.

Bolt took her advice a little too far. Instead of barking the guy into next week or zapping his tires with a blast of heat vision, Bolt took the man off his ride with a full-bodied tackle.

“Bolt!” everyone cried.

The dog paid them no heed. He was already racing to meet the other attacking forces.

Hunter grabbed the radio. “Shag, Exile!” he shouted, screeching to a halt. “Go back and-”

“Already on it!” Penny shouted as she hopped out the door. She pushed the left button on her scooter and the handlebar extended. Then a small flat platform extended between the two wheels. She hopped on, revved the throttle, and was off.

“Stop, Penny!” shouted Blitz. “Those biker boys are bad, bad humans!”

Penny wasn't listening. She zipped into the fray and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Come here, Bolt!”

Bolt turned, saw his girl in danger, and ran to her, desperate to keep between her and the attackers. Meanwhile, Penny, seeing that Bolt had listened, veered back towards the Street Rover. Exile was heading back and covering their retreat with blasts of freeze vision as the other Rovers piled out of the car.

Unfortunately, he didn't manage to nail enough of the ninjas. And as civilian cars rushed to get out of the way of this strange conflict, the masked riders rushed to catch up. And their cycles could go a lot faster than sixty.

If you need to go faster, fire the tow cable to catch an extra boost, Penny remembered her father saying in the recording. She glanced down at the handlebars, with no time to noticed the display screen in the middle that showed her speed and surrounding area. She pushed the button, and a small rod about the size of a hotdog flipped out from the shaft of the scooter. It shot out like a harpoon, towing a fine cable behind it.

At the same time, the scooter played a recording of her father's voice at two simultaneous pitches. One was for Penny's benefit, the other was a command only Bolt could hear. Zoom zoom.

Bolt needed no second bidding. With a burst of speed he didn't know he had, he dashed forward, caught the rod, and began running so fast that he and the scooter he was towing were nothing but a blur as they shot around the Road Rovers and well out of the danger zone.

“Woah, Bolt!” Penny cried. “Stop! Go back!”

Bolt curved around to obey, but he failed to account for a law of physics or two. As he turned, Penny shot past him. Her scooter struck a roadside mailbox – not the little kind on a post, either, we're talking a big, blue, public drop-off box – and catapulted her into the air. Hunter, who had veered away from the fight to keep up with them, managed to catch her.

“Penny!” cried Bolt, screeching to a stop.

“Bolt!” Penny shouted.

HONK HONK!

Stopping had been a good idea. Doing it in the middle of the road... not so much. Before anyone could respond, a cement mixer crashed into Bolt, sending him flying.

“Woooaahh!” he howled as he soared through the air and into a brick building. Literally into.

“Bolt!” cried Penny.

As the mixer, now with a fairly sizable dent in its front grill, pulled to a stop, a rain of bricks fell from the top of the hole Bolt had created. A moment after the rain stopped, Bolt stepped out looking slightly dazed but otherwise unharmed.

“I would not have predicted this,” observed Hunter.

Bolt shook himself off, releasing a small cloud of powdered bricks and cement from his fur. “What happened?” he asked.

“You found more new powers,” said Hunter, giving him a thumbs-up. “Super speed and you can smash through walls. Way cool.”

“Yeah,” agreed Penny, patting the dog. “Way cool.”

Apparently the professor had made the scooter out of some really serious stuff, because it was hardly even scratched by the impact with the mailbox, which had been ripped from two of its feet and lay crumpled on the asphalt.

“Must be that alloy one of Daddy's associates discovered,” Penny guessed.

Hunter held up a device. “Huh, we've still one of these babies onto one of the bad guys.”

“What is it?” asked Penny. It was a small sphere, and its surface felt like velcro. The bristly half, not the soft part. At a glance, it looked like an ordinary cocklebur.

“Eh, just a little something that'll help us find 'em,” replied Hunter.

A blaster bolt over their heads ended the discussion. “Duck!” shouted Hunter, a bit unnecessarily. Penny dove for an alley, and Hunter and Bolt went to work.

“'Scuse me,” Hunter taunted, catching a passing ninja with a power-wedgie. Another one, seeing his companion in trouble (not to mention extreme pain), angled his ride straight for Hunter.

“Gee, thanks,” Hunter said cooly, stepping to the side. “I was getting tired of walking, but they always say it's a bad idea to hitch-hike.”

The cyclist ran straight into a telephone pole, cracking his helmet and drawing a wince from Hunter. “Especially the way you drive.”

Bolt was putting his new-found speed to good use, ripping out a tire here and side-tackling another rider there. One rider was all set to run him down, when suddenly he disappeared.

“Huh?” asked the ninja. He felt a slight tug on the back of his shirt, and then suddenly found himself airborne as Bolt, clutching him by the back, vaulted off the motorcycle, which sped riderless to a fiery crash.

“Alright, Bolt!” Hunter exulted, thinking of high-fiving the superdog and then thinking better of it.

“Way to go-ski, little comrade!” called Exile as he and the others ran up.

Colleen smiled down at Bolt. “For a little guy, you do a cracker-jack job,” she beamed.

Bolt smiled, his eyebrows lowered in a “bring-it-on” type of grin.

“Ruh ruh?” asked Shag.

“Oh, Penny?” asked Hunter. “She's fine, she stayed out of the fight.” He turned to the alley. “Hey, Penny! You can come out now!”

No answer.

“Penny?” asked Hunter.

“Why won't she answer?” asked Bolt, stepping forward.

The answer was as bad as they feared, for when they looked in the alley, Penny was gone.

“Penny!” cried Bolt.

Hunter winced. “Yet another unexpected twist. Bummer.”

The Rovers searched the alley, anxious to find some clue as to Penny's whereabouts. There were none. “This is all my fault,” groaned Bolt. “I should have stayed with her.”

“Hey, don't get on yourself, Bolt,” Hunter told him. “You were helping fight off the bad guys.”

“That's right,” agreed Colleen. “It's not like you could have known it was a diversion.”

Blitz sagged. “There's no finding dem now,” he said. “We gave all the ones we caught to the cops, and none escaped with a tracer on dem.”

“That's it!” crowed Hunter. “The tracers! Penny took one just before the ambush! We can follow it straight to her!”

Exile laughed. “Hunter, you are as smart as a trap. You have mind like steel whip.”

“Save the complements,” snapped Bolt. “If there's any chance of finding her, we can't waste time!”

“He's right,” agreed Colleen. “We'd better 'ed back to the Sky Rover to follow them faster.”

In spite of the gravity of the situation, Hunter smiled. “Ooh, boy,” he grinned. “Muzzle's gonna love that.”

The Road Rovers couldn't deny they were a bit uneasy as they followed Penny's signal in their jet. In the first place, it was embarrassing to have their objective snatched right out from under their noses. But beyond that, all of them, even Blitz, who never took much of an interest in their objectives, had found Penny's earnestness to rescue her father quite admirable, almost canine. They wanted more than anything to see the family back together. But Bolt was as tense as a cat in a water balloon