Preston popped up to AR for a couple of dozen long seconds, crawling his way up closer to the beach. As soon as he got this done he was going to need to pop above the water to notify the team.

Then back into hot-sim for some surprisingly intense hacking. The host wasn’t all thatstrong, nor optimized for file protection, but all the same it was a near thing on the first sensor.

* Gamma: my hack was good, but it was barely enough
* Coleman: Good is good, but sometimes you also just have to be lucky

On the second he was almost done when he remembered recent security upgrades that focused on recognizing the small imperfections in timing of commands sequences coming from hackers, and made sure to clean up the consistency of hack before applying it. Again it felt like the sensor only grudgingly agreed to keep repeating its footage.

Preston returned to AR, and the odd sensation of sweating while in sea water. He dropped the rocks he’d brought with him and scrambled to his feet. He fired off a quick ARO to the team with the safe path through the compromised sensor array makred. <<Here’s your path. Go quickly. I’ll send Becky’s drone to you if there is trouble.>>