Read Online Time Was by Steve Perry - Free Book Online Page B

to go, and at thirty-two Celsius his heart.
    In the wind above, that could happen within minutes. Even if he could manage to kill them within two minutes of his exposure to the air, there was a chance there might be damage to his brain.
    Janus stood upside down, opposite the guards standing above him. All they had to do was wound him badly and everything would go haywire—even if he killed them. In his current situation, even a mere scratch could prove instantaneously fatal. He had to kill them; all they had to do was hit him. And he was wildly outgunned. Janus, fumbling in the cold, removed his tricut point from his speargun and took a stempoint from his bandolier. He could take one shot, but then he would have to reload. There were, after all, two of them.
    Janus looked at his timer. Seven minutes of oxygen left. His cheeks inside the mask were collapsing as he sucked air like a baby straining at an empty bottle. It took precious effort not to panic.
    A pair of bootprints stood near the hole. Janus’s heart beat intensely: Near enough?
    He walked underneath the man and knelt, inverted directly below him. He studied the boot soles. Rubber. Really meant for mud. Not bad for ice, but Janus’s spikes would have the edge on traction.
    Where there was an ice break like his exit hole, water usually bled around it for several feet. The weight of the ice pressing down on the entire lake kept forcing water slightly up, like a pressure valve giving. Helpers would spread sand by the hole if they were backing up an ice diver so that they wouldn’t slide in. But Janus had no backup crew; he hadn’t prepared the ice with sand. Immediately next to the hole, then, he could hope for a slight slick on the surface, over and beyond the slipperiness of the ice.
    Was the man close enough?
    As Janus watched, the bootprints stepped closer, and the gun shadow swung in the arc he knew. The guard was scanning: His gaze was raised.
    Janus dug his spikes into the ice and reached out of the water.
    The guard, from the corner of his eye, saw something black move out of the water and seize his ankle: Janus’s suited arm and mitt. Before the guard could fire, Janus pulled him across the slick ice and into the hole.
    To Janus, it was as if he had pulled the man, upside down, into a cloud of air bubbles that lived in his world. The guard fought like a great fish hauled on a line from the depths but he weighed nothing. Janus held on to him and tottered away from the hole, carrying him at arm’s length. Even under water the guard’s gun fired twice, but he couldn’t aim. The thousands of bubbles this manfish had brought with him moved upward to the ice and rolled about, trapped against the frozen surface of the lake. The guard gasped and struggled exactly like a fish in air, except that he kept seeming to want to fly upward out of Janus’s hands.
    His boot kicked Janus in the face, and Janus’s mouthpiece wrenched out but Janus held his breath, keeping the guard above him like a weight lifter pressing a barbell over his head, going for a world record—until he saw the guard take heavy gasps of water and go inert. The gun finally slipped from the man’s grip. Janus let him go and got his mouthpiece back in. He was so cold he was dizzy—his stomach and chest felt like frozen lead. The guard’s body, like a slow balloon, floated up in space and hung among the starfish.
    Beneath his feet Janus saw, in flashes, the bootprints of the other guard appearing and disappearing on the ice. Janus pulled desperately on the scraps of air in his regulator, but the pillow was pressing tighter and tighter across his face. He tried to prepare, but the cold was reaching his brain and slowing it down.
    This guard must have seen the first go under, perhaps seen where all the bubbles the first one brought in coagulated, because suddenly there was a terrible noise inside Janus’s head, inside it, all around it, and from