***Base, are you sure you want to***
Frost was opposed. “Johnny, let’s don’t stretch things too much this first day—“
But Winger was adamant. “When we go into combat, Doc, we’ve got to be able to trust each other, implicitly. Understand each other…like brothers. If I can’t see the world the way ANAD sees it, and him the same with me, that trust’ll never develop.”
Frost’s eyes met Mary Duncan’s. Grudgingly, he relented. “Go ahead.”
Johnny Winger closed his eyes but he still saw imagery…only it wasn’t the containment chamber in which he sat. The Tinytown pod, the piping, the thick ganglia of wires and cables and the heavy hatch door…all of that faded to gray, then to black. At first, only faint crackles and squiggles of light danced in front of his eyes—though his eyes were closed.
Then, like riding in a boat across a fog-shrouded lake, the far shore became more and more distinct, gradually materializing out of the gloom.
The imagery was hard to discern at first, so alien was the view. He had seen acoustic impressions from ANAD’s sounding before, displayed in interface controls, but that was a poor cousin to the real thing.
Now, he had somehow fallen off the boat and submerged and was beating his way against fierce currents and water choked with debris…boxes and beams and lamp shades and things there were no words for, shapes so dizzying and complex he couldn’t count the facets…huge diamonds and snakes and dumbbells floating by, scraping and shoving him along—