James Axler – Watersleep

Usually Ryan and his group were oblivious to where they might be until they left the walls of the military redoubts that held the mat-trans units—obliv­ious until J.B. confidently took his minisextant from one of the many pockets that lined his worn jacket. He would place the sextant to one eye and use it to look at the sky, and after a few moments of mental computations on maps and charts long ago memo­rized, he would reveal their new location.

They had jumped into hell and into paradise, al­ways appearing in the familiar gray setting of an abandoned underground military base, dusty with dis­use and littered with the empty boxes and remnants of the dead. The computers inside still functioned, drawing on a hidden atomic power supply that con­tinued to provide energy long after their masters had departed in the chaos before the nukes started to fall, and the period of skydark fell across the world.

But there was no sky here, dark or otherwise.

Only water. Only death.

Ryan’s brain shifted gears. How had he ended up down here?

He was no engineer, but he knew from hard-earned experience that the gateways didn’t work like this. He couldn’t have been transported into the nothingness of the sea without a mat-trans unit, and there was no unit here. Also, even if there had been some sort of freak accident, Ryan knew some of the others should have accompanied him.

And why wouldn’t his arms work? They floated aimlessly above his head, not responding to his frantic thoughts of escape. His clothing billowed around him like a parachute, but without providing any resistance. His legs also hung limply, the toes of his boots pointed down like twin anchors, pulling him steadily to the bottom, past the blind eyes of the elongated eellike creatures that were swimming past, their mouths yawning open as they sifted through the brine for microscopic bits of plankton.

Ryan willed his legs to kick, his arms to push down to check his descent, but it was as if he were an old wooden puppet dropped overboard, and his strings had been cut.

At the rate he was sinking, Ryan knew he’d run out of air long before feeling solid earth beneath his feet. Already a red haze was starting to settle over his field of vision from lack of oxygen. A coppery, bitter taste filled his mouth, mixing with the traces of salt water. So this is how it ended—not in a hailstorm of blasterfire or in a hand-to-hand knife battle, but un­derwater and alone.

Even as a young boy, Ryan Cawdor had always known he wasn’t the kind of man who would die quietly in his sleep, but he expected to go down more valiantly than this.

“A man always has a choice,” Trader had always said. “He can either live…or he can die.”

But Trader was wrong. There was no choice to be made when it came to living or dying.

The only choice was in how.

As his lungs began to ache and his heartbeat grew louder in his ears, Krysty’s face shone like a beacon in Ryan’s mind’s eye.

He clung to the image, struggled again to make his body work, willing his muscles to pull taut and arrest his descent. Suddenly, in a burst of movement, he was rewarded with his legs kicking out and his arms push­ing down.

Even though the adrenaline surge was far too late to save himself now, Ryan fought back as he contin­ued to plummet into the darkness, lost and alone

.

Chapter One

Ryan Cawdor opened his eye. Above him was the face of a crimson-haired angel.

“Welcome back, lover,” Krysty Wroth said, her flushed cheeks and anxious green eyes belying her light tone. “Decide to go for a swim without me?”

“Uh-huh. Come on in,” he rasped back. “The wa­ter’s fine.”

Ryan tried to pull himself to his feet, but gave up when he realized one of his legs wasn’t functioning. A pins-and-needles sensation was tingling from his left knee to his foot. His leg was asleep, and it felt like he’d been resting on it for a long time. He was having trouble breathing, too.