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the Anaconda .44 Magnum pistol and the speargun; they each had guns, he presumed. He didn’t doubt there was another guard up there, maybe more. They’d know it wasn’t safe for only one of them to try to take him.
    Janus trailed along beneath the guard’s bootprints and the gun’s searching shadow. This was what you wanted, wasn’t it? You against them? But not here , Janus thought.
    Dinoflagellates twinkled above him. He walked shod in silver on the glowing pearl of the ice.
    And marring his pearl: black bootprints, and the shadow of a gun.
    They were at the exit hole. He’d sunk an Ikelight below it for safety. The clouds overhead were thick, perhaps they had noticed his light, even so deep? Was it too strong, the Ikelight? No. They’d just been lucky. But if he survived this he wouldn’t use the Ikelight any more if an assignment involved ice-diving. There’d be more chance of becoming lost beneath the ice, but it would be better than this: one single-shot speargun against the rifle.
    Ahead he saw more shadows by his entrance hole.
    Another pair of black bootprints.
    The prints Janus was following reached the other set and they faced each other, conferring. Shadows now of two guns, two scopes.
    Two men with rifles waiting at his exit hole. Odds were they knew his single tank couldn’t carry much more than forty minutes’ worth of air.
    I’m dead , Janus thought.
    He could feel a tug when he tried to breathe and had a spasm of fear. Sucking at the air as the tank emptied was like trying to breathe through a pillow pressing tighter and tighter against his face.
    That wasn’t his only problem. He had lost great quantities of body heat the whole time he was underwater. Not just from the exhaustion; the water, with a specific heat exactly one thousand times greater than air, had been conducting warmth away from his body twenty-five times as rapidly as air would at this temperature, Fahrenheit twenty-eight. The lake had been leeching heat from him—heat of energy, of strength and redemption, of life itself—while he was under.
    He had only a very small reserve.
    The shivering and the coldness he felt in his hands were signs his extremities had already fallen below ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit. His body’s thermoregulatory system had turned on its defense mechanisms and he’d begun to shiver.
    Damn!
    Heavy shivering increased the body’s basal heat production five to seven times. The vasoconstriction called gooseflesh meant his skin had begun sealing itself tighter to keep body heat in, stop blood flow to his periphery, where heat evaporated faster, and preserve it around his core organs. These were signs his body was chilling toward death, had gone through its heat and fallen onto its last reserve.
    It was getting damn cold under here.
    His blood temperature was dropping too fast.
    Time was running out on him.
    They knew it.
    He knew it.
    All God’s chillun knew it.
    All they had to do was wait him out. Perhaps that was why they were both at the hole now, anticipating his return.
    He couldn’t think of alternatives. He could walk to some spot of shallow ice by a tide island and break his way out easily enough—and freeze to death. More than air, he needed to get into that drying shed, which his heater had been warming since he began this assignment, where hot liquid was waiting in a thermos, where his cache of Just-In-Case weapons was sitting, and—most important—where his two-way radio waited, powered by a portable generator that had maybe thirty minutes’ worth of juice left.
    If his core temperature—the deep tissue areas of his body, as opposed to his extremities—had fallen only two degrees Fahrenheit below normal, to ninety-seven degrees, or thirty-six Celsius, as he thought of it, then Janus had already begun to die of hypothermia. When his deep tissues reached thirty-four degrees Celsius his brain would begin