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.He put his face up against the roof and took a gasping breath, water lapping against the sides of his mouth.He hung there, floating, breathing in more, until he stopped wheezing, until his heart stopped pounding.It was okay.He was going to be okay.When he felt calm, he dived back into the water and swam down.But instead of swimming to the floor controls, he swam through them and outside.For a moment he was lost, disoriented in the open ocean, and thought he’d gone in the wrong direction.And then he caught sight of the shadow of the rope, realized he was looking too high.He looked down a little and there it was.He swam to the plasma cutter and grabbed it, immediately striking back for the submarine bay, dragging the rope along with him.With the rope, it was too heavy, the progress very slow.For a moment he considered abandoning the cutter, and then an idea struck him.He turned and switched the cutter on and cut through the rope with it.The cutter was heavy, making it so he could use only one arm to swim.It threatened to drag him down.He made it to just beneath the bay floor and then swam desperately up, kicking hard with his legs, a little panicked.By the time he got his fingers around the edge and pulled himself in, he was nearly as exhausted as he’d been from the initial swim down.He thrust it into a corner and then swam quickly for the controls for the floor.He pressed the button and held it down.The emergency lights in the room began to flash.Slowly, he saw, the floor was sliding out of its channel and coming across, coming closed.He swam up for the pocket of air and for a moment couldn’t find it.Where was it? He swam back along the ceiling and found a pocket about the size of his fist, just enough to get his face into.He sucked it in, then breathed quickly out, the pocket growing larger.Below him, he heard the water-dulled clang of the submarine bay floor closing and then the gentle throb of the pumps.The water level began to drop and he got his head completely out, took a deep gasping breath, and immediately blacked out.Michael, the voice said.Michael.Wake up.He opened his eyes.It was his father.I asked you to get up, his father said.How many times do I have to ask?In a minute, Dad, he said.His voice sounded strange, hollow, as if coming from a distance.I said now, said his father.Get up or I’ll drag you out of bed myself.He didn’t move.His dad shook him.He moaned, shook his head.Dad—Get up! His father was screaming now, so close to his face that he could smell the liquor on his breath.Get up!He came conscious facedown, half-on and half-off the catwalk running the edge of the chamber.He had been lucky.He was alive and coughing up water rather than floating facedown in the center of the room, dead.He struggled and leaned back against the wall, gathering himself.Then he inched to the edge of the catwalk and jumped off and into the water.He couldn’t find the plasma cutter.Maybe something had gone wrong.Maybe it had shaken loose when the doors were closing and had slid out into the water.Maybe it was gone.He resurfaced, holding on to the edge of the catwalk, and then went down again, searching more carefully this time.He found it wedged behind a float, all but impossible to see until he was almost touching it.He worked it free and surfaced again, pulling himself out and onto the catwalk.Then he lay there on the grille a moment, breathing, trying to recover.When he got up, he was still shaky, his nerves jittery.He wiped the droplets off the wall com unit with his palm and connected to the Marker chamber.“Hello?” said Harmon, his voice a little panicked now.“Hello?”“It’s me, Altman,” he said.Harmon squinted at the screen.“Altman,” he said.“I wondered if you were still alive.You still are, aren’t you? This isn’t a vision, is it? You look different.”“I’m still alive,” said Altman.“Just a little wet.”“Where are you?” he asked.“Submarine bay,” said Altman.“Not far.”Harmon nodded.He pulled a holofile up and spun it so that Altman could see it.“Here you are,” Harmon said, and a red blotch appeared on the map.“It’s simple,” he said.“Down this hallway, the one with the slight slope.Then into a new hall, past these two labs.A final hall and there you are.”“What’s between you and me?” asked Altman.“Close to the Marker, nothing,” said Harmon.“They won’t get close to the Marker.If you can get into the final hallway, you should be all right.Before that, it might be a little trickier.”He flashed Altman a view of the hall just outside the submarine bay lock.The camera made a slow sweep, showing a pile of corpses, a pallid batlike creature fluttering above them, and then dissolved into a wall of static.“This was just before the camera was destroyed,” he said.“Who knows what’s there now.”The view changed, two separate cameras, two labs.In one, a spiderlike creature like the one he’d killed before, only this one had a third head and a ridge of spines along its back [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]