Timecaster: Supersymmetry by J.A. Konrath, Joe Kimball Read Free Book Online

portal, glowing faint red.
    I swam for it. After a few breast strokes, I got light-headed. My lungs felt like two burning paper bags, desperately craving air. I kicked with everything I had, dragging myself along the hull, cutting my palms and breaking my fingernails while scraping against zebra mussels and barnacles. Then I felt a light tug on the back of my neck, and pink filled my All Vision Contact Lens.
    The salmonster. It was back.
    I spun onto my back, ready to kick at the creature, but then its tentacle came free of my neck, and I watched it pull a lamprey into its mouth—a lamprey that had apparently been sucking my blood.
    Fucking lamprey. They ought to do something to rid the waters of those damn things.
    While I was preoccupied with that, something grabbed me from behind, shocking me so badly my lungs emptied. The urge to inhale was so strong now I knew I couldn’t resist it, and I opened my mouth, trying to brace myself for pain and death, realizing there was no way to brace myself for pain and death, then finally realizing that was a pretty stupid last thought to have.
    Then something forced its way past my teeth. Something soft yet stiff.
    Another lamprey, trying to eat my tongue as I drowned?
    I couldn’t fight my body anymore, and sucked in, expecting the choke of lake water.
    Instead, I breathed air.
    Gasping, amazed, confused, relieved, I turned around and saw Alter-Vicki. She held a metal canister with two tubes coming from the top. One snaked into her mouth. The other led into mine.
    A scuba tank.
    She beckoned me forward with her finger, and I swam behind her, over to the porthole, following her inside the bowels of the ship. It was pitch black, so I tapped my eyelid again, going to night vision. We were in a hallway, upside-down and leaning to the right. Everything was an eerie, night-glow green, and as we swam we kicked up sediment in great, billowing clouds. If my mouth were free, I would have commented how this was a really shitty place for a hideout. But then we were through a doorway, swimming upward, into a room flooded with light.
    Our heads broke the surface, and I tapped my AVCL back to normal and looked around.
    Once again, Alter-Talon impressed me with his ingenuity. He’d somehow managed to turn a compartment in a shipwreck into a furnished mini-apartment, complete with a bed, refrigerator, microwave, breakfast bar, and a dining set for two. Tastefully done, I might add. Everything Rick Schieve.”
    ed to like my wifeG in a faux woodgrain with mauve accents.
    Alter-Vicki pulled out her mouthpiece, proving the hideout also came with air. Nice.
    I pulled myself out of the water, onto the tile floor, and Alter-Vicki offered me a towel.
    “Thanks,” I said. “For a second there, I thought you were trying to kill me.”
    I took the towel, and saw she had a gun beneath it.
    A gun she was pointing right at me.

Chapter 7
    Michio Sata blotted his polyester napkin against his lips, patting off a dab of spaghetti sauce. The meal, while filling, was on the low end of mediocre. The chef apparently thought plenty of garlic could cover up his shortcomings.
    The multiverse won’t miss this place when I destroy it.
    Sata checked his watch. He’d originally planned on annihilating all life on the planet eighty-seven minutes from now, giving him a chance to get home and watch one final
Murder, She Wrote
rerun on satellite TV. The show was archaic and woefully predictable, but he liked Angela Lansbury’s portrayal of the plucky, determined Jessica Fletcher. How much fun it would have been to go up against her. She would have made such a better adversary than Talon. So smart and ahead of the curve.
    Of course, she probably wasn’t much in the fighting department. Perhaps
Magnum, P.I.
would be a better adversarial choice.
    Sata wondered if alternate earths had a Jessica Fletcher that was a martial arts expert.
    Of course they do. In an infinite multiverse, there are infinite earths. Everything that can