“I... no, no you are not, Dr. Ouilette. My apologies.”

“You could have contributed, too. You would have had to have been a good man, pursued a military career, gotten yourself properly trained and educated in a trade of choice, and you, too, could go off into the stars, battle gloriously for the fate of Terra, and likely die out there to a horde of incoming aliens.” Pritchard tried to hide his very mixed feelings about such a thing, but not very well. Her voice was just too good at bringing them to the surface.

“The fact I qualify to defend your inappropriate decisions in life sounds very much like I am obligated to protect you, thus punishing me for my correct choices!

“I rather think you should go protect me! I can have the requirements waived, we’ll get you suited up in some power armor, and send you off to fight horrific aliens with steel carapaces, acidic blood, monomolecular cutting pincers, and similar things for me, what do you say?”

Nobody believed her, but her point was obvious. Ambassador Pritchard decided that staying away from the microphone was a good idea at that point.

“In short, I am here making sure that those who survive what is coming have something to come back to. You may or may not have noticed that superhuman criminal activity has not stopped at all during the past two years. They have the remarkably pragmatic attitude that they aren’t helping, they aren’t going to help, and any help they could give us would be immaterial, so why bother. They’ll trust in us heroic types to sacrifice ourselves trying to save everyone. If we succeed, hopefully a few of us are killed, making it easier on them, and if we fail, they’re going to die anyway, so there’s no reason to worry about it.

“While we’ve been building up forces to save galaxies, they’ve tried to pass a bill in the States to register all Powered as weapons, like we are firearms; they’ve made multiple runs at the financial backing and businesses owned, operated by, or affiliated with the heroic community; are still attempting to pass laws that undercut and hamper heroic members of the people; and of course the petty tyrants, warlords, and criminal organizations have just carried on with business as normal, attempting to recover from the blows inflicted on them and expand their power and territories.

“I will be at least contributing some, and when I am called on, I am going to be doing a LOT of killing. Not fighting, killing. Horrific and terrifying amounts of killing, using what power I have as directly and lethally as possible on a scale you don’t want to believe I can do so at.

“I will be doing so in order that some random alien race neither of us have heard of doesn’t come to Terra, wipe our ecosystem out down to the bacteria, and replace it with some fond memories of the home in another dying dimension they’ve fled from.

“As you can imagine, if the men and women going through that Hell come back and find out you’ve all done some monumentally stupid stuff in the interim, there are going to be some very, very big problems. I’ll also be here to make sure those stupid things don’t happen. For instance, ensuring that ‘Superhumans Registration Act’ never made it to the floor in the United States. Idiocy in paper and ink,” she sniffed. “I am good at the job, I enjoy the job, and I am trusted to do the job.”

“Now, do the learned ambassadors have any other questions? My time is worth a great deal, and I do not like wasting it.”

Being a public face for the superhero is SO exasperating, DiDi sighed inside, but her eyes glittered dangerously. This was indeed her job, and she was going to do it very well, indeed...

===========

Somewhere on the Road...

“Danica! We’ve got N-Zoners coming off the ‘way!” Jobbers barked at her over coms.

“Got it!” Danica called back. “Is the Shoe still under camo?” she called back, as the metal ahead of her folded aside silently. She pulled out a brand-new shield array she’d never seen before and the control system for it, tossing them onto her Disk.

She didn’t make Pit Stops often, but this was a big one, and she could have spent hours here. She was at least four galaxies away from Terra, which meant the tech here was of styles and types they’d never seen before, and so was perfect for sending back home for the engineers to take apart and work out.

“He’s deep and quiet, but you know they scrounge everywhere!” the Happanustan replied in a quieter voice. She could hear the peculiar whine of Zoner power systems coming from the distance now.

“Got it. I just need the primary power system off this wreck...” Manipulated matter peeled away, exotic Elements remaining behind as she literally disassembled the casing for the core, pulled it out, and dumped it on the Disk. “On my way back!”

Normally she wouldn’t have anything to fear from anyone, being in a Pit Stop and all, but the N-Zoners who had made it onto The Road had proved to have extremely violent and nigh-suicidal tendencies, attacking everyone and everything. This reputation had spread rapidly along the Roads, Highways, and Superhighways alike, the word taken on out and brought on back, and so the news traveled fast.

They either didn’t know or didn’t care that violence at Pit Stops was a death sentence on the Road. The idiots had actually destroyed two Pit Stops entirely, and wiped out the beings at a dozen more. None of those responsible had made it off the Road alive, but the simple fact they’d done it meant that N-Zoners of any stripe were Kill on Sight, and the tech to identify them, their engines, and origins made the rounds of the Drivers damn fast.

Almost magically, you could say.

The Tender at the Pit Stop was already gone, and the people there had spilled out onto Trails, Paths, and off-Roads away from incoming horde with the speed of long practice. It took less than two minutes for the ratchety, technorganic, crazy-wheeled vehicles of this group of Zoners to reach the Pit Stop, and yet there was nobody left inside or outside for them to shoot.

Danica flew back to where Shoe was under a hologram disguise as another heap of scrap, knowing that the Zoners usually had dimensional detectors and would sense her if she Doored around. Their lead elements were already dismounting, looked like some form of tentacle-limbed reptile this time, running into the Stop and finding nothing except coffee or its like going cold, and nothing on the stove or in the coolers for them to steal. Only the Tenders could pull stuff out of storage at a Pit Stop...

Shoe split his top, and she dropped into her seat, her Disk sliding into the trunk’s storage compartment where it was promptly Itemized. Three tons of the heaviest elements she could find separated into softball-sized spheres and loaded themselves into the rail guns’ Compressed magazines.

Jobbers was waiting, watching the N-Zoners coolly. He looked something like an anthropomorphic bulldog, except he was orange with blue spots and pale amber eyes. He was also a Trail Ranger, but he’d lost his mount after a fight on a Trail, and had been standing forlorn at the side of the Road she’d been on when she pulled up and offered him a ride after seeing his badge.

That had been six months ago, and he was still Riding with her.

“You’re last on purpose,” he chided her gruffly.

She just laughed at him. “We’ll hit a Chase as soon as we pull up on the next Road, right?” Jobbers glanced at the dash chrono and nodded once. “What happens to a Chase with N-Zoners now?”

He grinned with bright fangs. Although he loved his fresh meat, the Ring on his finger meant he didn’t need to eat or drink, and he had proclaimed it the second most precious thing he had found on the Road.

The first was her, the best friend and guide on the Road he could have imagined, of course!

“The Chase becomes Hell-Raised.” He’d seen it more than once, the magical effect of upgrading the types and numbers of Chasers in response to certain actions on the Road. Those who ignored the Rules of the Road were prime for it, and N-Zoners chasing prey on the Road were hugely prone to attracting the wrong kind of attention.

“Lead ‘em and squeal ‘em,” she pronounced. Shoe literally roared to life, and serpentine heads snapped around in surprise as a scrap heap flew apart, and Shoe bolted for the way out.

There was a desultory discharge of odd particle fire in their direction, which didn’t do much beyond bite into some scrap. However, one stray shot did find an unbroken fusion bottle or something, because something went up explosively behind them, and she saw at least one Zoner gunner get chopped right in two by a whirling piece of stray side armor.

Yeah, the Road didn’t much like Zoners.

Shoe was smooth as butter as the roar of his engine fell to a mere purr, Danica reaching in and neutralizing all vibration idly, rendering the whole system nigh-perfectly efficient in flow and action. Even while some of the incoming vehicles took right off after her, they couldn’t catch her before she pulled out the far side of the scrap heap and was heading for the Road.

The short, stubby railguns deCompressed and rose from the rear mounts. Danica whistled cheerfully as Jobber’s dash up-ended and suddenly he was seated in his own autocannon capsule, waiting coolly for the door to fold out and help add some additional havoc to those trailing Shoe.

Helmet, her Ultraspecs, was actually aiming the railguns, their magical rifling extending their internal muzzle length to a cool hundred meters, meaning the gravimetric accelerations of the heavy loads they pumped out had plenty of time to work.

It also nicely disguised the power source of Shoe being the Cosmic Control Rod. She had to run its power through a lot of filters to lose the signature on her Ride’s shields...

The Rod was why the N-Zoners kept finding her. The Road, despite disliking them, was doing its job and sending them in the direction of what they wanted. They didn’t know she had the thing, of course, but that didn’t stop them from spreading along the Road after her, chasing her and being Chased... and thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, and perhaps even millions of them dying as they swamped the Road, and the Road swamped them right back.

Hellraiser Chases were not anything to look down on, even for techno-barbarian cultures.

There was no boom from the rail gun, although the zip of the sphere would definitely generate attention. It plowed right through one of the following cars, the dumped kinetic energy blowing it apart, and unstable power systems adding some pyrotechnics to the effect as the pseudo-car went tumbling widely. There was no threat of it hitting multiple targets, as the Road’s One Shot, One Kill Rule was always in effect. Even if the round could have torn through a dozen vehicles easy, it got one kill and lost all its power, becoming just a fallen ball of metal on the Road, to be swept away and deposited in the Scrap Heap nearby.

She swept the whole firing system with her awareness, politely dusting off any impediments and keeping the system in shape with Matter Manipulation. Such a handy ability!

The N-Zoners didn’t really understand the Rules of the Road, and were shooting at her outside the possible range of their weapons. She let them spark harmlessly off her shields, not even testing the power draw, and continued shooting back at them with the equivalent of an artillery cannon.

The Road was biased towards projectile weapons, but it didn’t care about the speed of them, only the size. The bigger they were, the longer the range, and the more damage they did. That was that. Outside that range, they were literally useless and could not be aimed, simply scattering randomly around their targets.

So, really rapid-firing light stuff? Useless, except within a hundred yards or so. Bigger rounds, like .50 cal? Two hundred yards. Artillery, howitzer, anti-tank stuff? Depending on the shell size, good up to a kilometer if they were large enough, or at least four hundred yards otherwise.

It didn’t seem like much, but when you had targets moving 200+ mph, a quarter-mile was only seconds of travel. Hand-held weapons couldn’t snipe targets at all, and picking off things from long range was nigh impossible. Big guns were really hard to aim accurately, after all, even if they did have range and impact.

Energy weapons had even shorter ranges, generally half that of projectile weapons. Sure, high tech leaned that way, as raw energy was easier to carry than kinetic ammunition. However, if you could manage your ammo, you could totally outrange someone using particle beamers, lasers, solid light, plasma loads, or kinetic lances, it was no problem at all.

That was important, because N-Zoners tended to be high-tech, and loved them their exotic energy beamers. They also loved thumping on them in exasperation when the three-hundred-meter to kilometer-long range of their personal firearms was reduced to an exasperating hundred meters or less, and even mounted heavy beamers were a fraction of what they should have been.

Hey, techno-barbs. Danica wasn’t going to tell them anything.