Free Time Was by Steve Perry

the center of the bubble mass he saw a streak of bubbles fly through the ice as fast as a tracer bullet in wartime night.
    The guard, panicked, was shooting at the ice.
    Janus moved away from the bubbles as shot after shot punched through, each bullet marked by a brilliant silver bubble trail that bent in the water after a few yards and arced in all directions.
    Janus pushed himself away from the eruptions.
    The bullets followed.
    This guard had quickly learned to distinguish where Janus’s bubbles were beneath the ice.
    Janus held his breath and moved. The bubble he had breathed a second ago bounced down his side and reached the ice. A second later a bullet burst up through it, angled in the water, and almost caught him. He saw the trail of bubbles it made go past his eyes.
    Janus made a sharp right. Inadvertently some air left the regulator and reached the ice. A bullet came up through it instantly.
    Janus guessed, and made a quick dodge backward. He was right—four bullets pulled up through the ice in the direction he had been going. The guard had seen the track of the bubbles and was leading him. He was a better hunter than the one Janus had just killed. Janus’s air was nearly gone and he was freezing: He couldn’t keep this up much longer.
    He held his breath and angled—no bullets. The guard must be changing clips. To fire so quickly the gun must be a semiautomatic.
    Janus crouched, let out one breath, pushed the shaking bubble with his hands, and sprang away from it. The second it hit the ice a bullet lanced it, probing for him.
    Janus moved in a circle, trying to get his little speargun into position to fire. Each time he breathed he shoved the bubble from him and danced a different way to the side. The bullets came up through them, the water shook with the sound, but he was not hit. Janus fought to watch the bootprints with one eye and the bullets with the other. His mask limited his field of vision dangerously. Janus circled, working to get the open entrance hole between him and the bootprints.
    A bullet, perhaps an hysterical shot, came through the ice almost at Janus’s feet.
    The guard was close to the hole now, on the other side from Janus. The last few shots he had been pivoting—Janus would see the heels disappear as the man rose to his toes in the pivot. The ice, Janus imagined, must now be awash from the fountains of water that had sprung up whenever the bullets plunged through the ice. The man was not trying to move on the slick ice but was wisely holding still, turning, then aiming his weapon. Janus doubted that, unless he was an ice diver, the guard knew his boots could be seen—and he could see nothing of Janus but the ghosts of bubbles.
    Janus blew breath out, pushed the bubbles behind him and to the left, leaped with his ten-pound weight a long moon-leap sideways from the boots so that at last he had the open water of the exit hole between him and the guard. Thunder, water vibrations; bullets whizzed like bees through his bubbles as they touched ice. Janus landed kneeling. Through the shining surface he saw, as if beneath him, blue sky and the gray parka of the guard, aiming a long brown stick toward the water. The water magnified everything, so that Janus saw the guard, shimmery but large; saw the gun fire and kick; saw him as clearly as if he, Janus, knelt on a rock, and looked at a six-foot-long fish just beneath him in the clearest water.
    The guard would see him just as clearly, too.
    Before the guard could swing his gun and shoot through the hole, Janus fired. The speargun’s stempoint, nine times larger than a .45 Magnum round, hurled up out of the water into the guard’s stomach, glanced off the inside of his ribs, and—with the one-ton stainless cable holding it to the stem—the five-inch blade swung like a clock hand inside the man’s tissues, from eleven o’clock to five o’clock, slicing through half the organs in his body.
    Janus