Time Was by Steve Perry

searing pain in his throat, and soon he was able to breathe easily and move freely with only a little agony. He managed to get out of his wetsuit and into some dry, warm clothes, taking care to check out the window for signs of other guards who might have heard the shooting earlier, and as he looked he saw maybe a dozen hover-cars rising out of the compound, swarming together, massing like dark, angry hornets, but before they could clear the distance the air ignited in a thunderous flash and Janus grinned because the first of the six bombs he’d set in the compound were now detonating, seven seconds apart, and would level 90 percent of the main building by the time they were finished, so that meant he was probably safe for a little while, thirty minutes tops—and that reminded him about the radio, so he staggered over and flicked it on, turned the transmission dial until he got the frequency he needed, instructed the person on the other end to patch him through, and when the person he wanted to speak to was on the other end, Janus said, “It’s ‘Come-and-Get-Me-Time.’”
    â€œDid you get the disks?”
    â€œYou’ll have to pick me up to find out, won’t you?”
    â€œI’m not in the mood for attitude, Janus.”
    â€œNeither am I. I need medical attention, so have a doctor ready.”
    â€œYou’ll have everything you need. Give me your location and I’ll have the chopper airborne in five minutes.”
    â€œYou’d have a little trouble landing where I’m at.” He gave them an alternate location, a field less than half a mile from his present location. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
    â€œThe chopper will be waiting.”
    â€œIt damned well better be,” said Janus, “or your precious disks are going right into the lake.”
    â€œWhat a trusting soul you are.”
    â€œJust my warm and fuzzy nature. Don’t be late.”
    And with that, he killed the connection, gathered up his weapons, and set about preparing to blow up the shed and most of the ice supporting it.

20
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    It took Mr. James a lot longer to die than Annabelle had estimated.
    Not that she didn’t have the stomach for such things; for her, watching someone who’d betrayed her die was akin to stepping on a worm wriggling on a hot sidewalk, and carried about as much guilt.
    Still, it was fun to watch the expressions on Tyler’s young face as he watched the other man begin to fry from the inside out.
    And all the while, behind him, there stood Simmons, reciting the facts aloud in that delightful, clipped, and (Annabelle thought) subtly sexy watered-down British accent of his.
    â€œWhat you’re watching, Mr. Tyler, is the fruition of Ms. Donohoe’s improvements on the function of nanites.”
    Tyler, not moving his gaze from James, said, “W-w-what’re those?”
    â€œNanites are used for manufacturing on the molecular level, sir,” said Simmons patiently, as if addressing a slow-witted child. “They are, for all intents and purposes, microscopic-sized robots. The one in Mr. James’s system looks something like a mechanical spider.
    â€œThey are programmed to build anything—organic and inorganic—from the base up, including themselves. They can self-replicate.”
    â€œWhat he’s saying,” whispered Annabelle in Tyler’s ear, “is that all we have to do is introduce one preprogrammed nanite into a person’s system, and within a few hours there can be thousands, millions, theoretically trillions , of them swimming along with the cells.”
    â€œThen,” said Simmons, “they begin the process of breaking down, then rebuilding a person’s molecular structure, causing a chemical reaction that turns a human being into a time bomb.”
    â€œIt all has to do with quarks and something known as the X-Particle Theory and gets a bit complicated,”