***ANAD steering to commanded heading…Hub, what effector setting?...I’m having quite a battle just maneuvering through this slop***
Winger thought. “Bond disrupters full charge…pyridine probes out when I give the word, carbene grabbers too.”
Inside of a minute, the rapidly growing ANAD swarm had slashed its way through the melee and was riding along the optic nerve, a direct highway into Deeno’s brain.
Time to go small, he told himself. He set the view on his wristpad, took a hack from ANAD’s sounding and closed his own eyes, kneeling beside the bed so he wouldn’t fall over.
He went ‘over the waterfall’ and found himself in the usual sleet of polygons and trapezoids hurtling at him, beating against the ocean waves of van der Waals forces. The image before him skittered and careened before it settled down to a wobbly but steadying view of dark viny shapes, the increasingly dense neural net that was Deeno D’Nunzio’s cerebral cortex.
Time to go hunting, he told ANAD. Sounding ahead now—
He didn’t have long to wait. He dropped ANAD down to one quarter propulsor, probing for the faintest hint of high thermals and electromagnetic disturbance, anything showing lots of atom smashing ahead. I don’t have a map, he muttered. We’ll just have to go where sensors take us.
“ANAD, tune sensors for anything off-nominal, any kind of bond-breaking disturbance. “