Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Empire State University was located in Greenwich Village. The main building was an old structure, full of little rooms tucked off into odd nooks and crannies. One tiny broom closet into which Peter had found his way looked down through a small window over at the Science Building. There were endless ways for a Spider-Man, or other unauthorized person, to sneak into or out of ESU’s campus, if that person knew where those ways were. And if you were expecting someone who didn’t know the ins and outs, you could make their welcome a very interesting one, indeed.

  The new annex out back was not nearly so architecturally inspiring as the main building, built as it was during a period when being functional was deemed more important than being stately, but it too had its advantages. Over his years of study, Peter had had plenty of leisure to observe where its ducts went, which grilles led into which part of the air-conditioning system, what roof spaces gave onto rooms through utility traps or openings to attic storage space. A clever and determined person could stay out of sight and out of mind for a long time up in those empty spaces—moving from place to place, keeping an eye on things. That was what Peter had in mind for Spider-Man. But first, he had some things to take care of which Spider-Man couldn’t manage with impunity and Peter Parker could.

  He headed up the big marble steps, through the front hall and the body of the main building, finally on out the back door to the little square which separated the main building from the annex.

  The annex was all very sixties-academic—plate glass, aluminum, and solid blocks of color. Somebody with a strange taste for modern art had erected, in the middle of the square, something which purported to be a stainless steel Tree of Life. The science students claimed that, on moonlit spring nights, coeds danced around it scattering ball bearings. At most other seasons of the year, the thing was festooned with toilet paper. Everyone hated it.

  Peter went up the shallower set of steps by the science building, paused by the bulletin board inside the front doors, and looked to see if anything interesting had been posted. This time of year, between the active semesters, there was nothing much to be seen but some outdated flyers about parties, and a university directory of Internet e-mail addresses that had probably been out of date by the end of the week it had been posted. Far down on one page of it, someone had scribbled, FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL PI 3-1417….

  Peter went off to the right, where a stairwell led to the classrooms on the second floor, and a door in the wall stood underneath it. This was where the Nuclear Physics department was, for the simple reason that most of the equipment was too heavy to be put any higher.

  The door under the stairs was not a swinging door, like most of the others in the building, but required a key to open. Peter pulled his key out of his pocket and let himself in. All the instructors and doctoral and degree students working in Nuke had the keys: they weren’t exactly difficult to lay hands on. But that door was a boundary of sorts. Here the construction of the building changed, got abruptly heavier and more solid. Walls were thicker, and in the hall behind the door a wall jutted out into the corridor, covering two-thirds of its width from the left side out. About five feet further on, another wall did the same from the right side. It was good old-fashioned radiation safety. Should some kind of accident occur inside, radiation couldn’t just stream through the door and out. The construction and look of it was very fallout-shelterish, and every now and then it brought back Peter’s childhood memories of crouching under his desk at school with his hands over his head during atomic war drills. What was the old song? “Duck and Cover?” A lot of good it would have done us at ground zero, he thought as he went past the baffle.

  He headed on through to the classroom and lab area. The place was utterly quiet. It felt that way even in mid-semester. The machinery here didn’t need heavy air-conditioning: most of the machines had few or no moving parts. But the whole place, clean and light and bright as it looked, held a slight edge of threat, of silent power, usable by some, misusable by others, waiting to see which way it would go.

  The door at the very end of the downstairs hall was the one Peter was heading for. It, too, was locked. The same key opened it as had opened the outer door.

  He put his head in. As he’d hoped, lights were on, shining on the big closed cabinets, the blocky silent machines. “Hello?” he said.

  “Yo!” came a familiar woman’s voice from the back. “Who’s that?”

  “Peter Parker.”

  “Good lord, the wandering boy returns!” the voice half-sang from the back of the room. A cheerful face with blonde hair drawn tightly back in a ponytail peered at him around a room divider.

  “Dawn,” Peter said. “How’re you doing?”

  “Not too bad,” Dawn said. “Catching up on work—” She put unusual emphasis on the word as she grinned wickedly at him. Peter was hoping that Dawn McCarter—no, Dawn Luks her name was now; he kept forgetting she was married, though it had been more than a year—would still be around working on her dissertation. She was a doctoral candidate in Nuclear Physics, and had one of the quickest, brightest minds he had ever seen, able to move within a second from a learned discussion of supercollider physics to going “ooji-ooji-ooji” at her new daughter. Speaking of whom, he noticed Dawn’s baby girl sitting in her carrier on the floor, waving a pink-and-white star-and-heart chew-toy in front of her face, and occasionally giving it a good gumming. “I see you got stuck with the baby this time,” he said.

  “Ron’s deep into work-on-the-computer mode. The kid could drop dead in front of him and he wouldn’t notice. Since I’m just polishing off the dissertation work, I figured I’d take her in here for the next week or so. God knows we can’t afford a sitter on our stipends. How’s MJ? What’s she up to, these days?”

  “Just fine. She’s doing the audition circuit right now.”

  “What brings you in?” she said. “Didn’t think I’d see you until the fall.”

  “Oh, well, I’m supposed to be meeting with my advisor, but he’s running a bit late.”

  Dawn laughed. “So what else is new?”

  Peter wandered around the room. There was a lot of big, bulky, expensive, and difficult-to-move machinery in here. One large installation on the side, a glove-box with three sets of waldoes for working with sensitive material behind leaded glass and concrete. Next to it, a big lead safe for storing radioactive material, with a smaller one beside it; various light sensing equipment here and there; and over in the far corner, about twenty feet away, the thing he was most concerned about, and which Dawn was working with: the casings and materials fabrication unit. After all, you couldn’t just carry nuclear material around in a lunchbox, you had to build containers according to the requirements of the sample in question, to handle its specific level of radiation, and to suit the application for which it was to be used. It was a combination isolation box and machine shop, all very compactly made. The whole thing was no more than four feet square, and it had occurred to Peter that, if Hobby were going to steal something at this point, this might very well be it. It would be difficult to move, but far from impossible.

  Dawn was busy inside it at the moment, putting the final touches on a small lead-lined carrier box. “For sushi, right?” Peter said, looking over her shoulder through the leaded glass.

  “Idiot,” Dawn said affectionately. “Here, amuse the rugrat while I’m working on this.”

  “Hey there, gorgeous,” Peter said, hunkering down beside the baby, “how ya doing?” The baby took the chew-toy out of her mouth, looked at it thoughtfully, and offered it to Peter.

  “No, thanks,” he said, “I’m trying to cut down.” He let the baby grab his finger in her fist and shook it around a little. She gurgled.

  He turned back towards the blond. “So how goes the dissertation, anyhow? It was something to do with transuranic superconductors, wasn’t it?” As he stood up from beside the baby, he palmed one of the spider-tracers from his pocket and stuck it unobtrusively near the bottom of the fabricator unit.


  “Yeah,” Dawn said, not actually looking at Peter, engrossed as she was. “Most of the papers were saying the lanthanide connection wasn’t turning out to be very productive… so I decided to try some of the higher transuranics, and see if sandwiching them together with one of the higher-temp superconductors would produce any results.”

  “Which one were you playing with?” While he spoke, Peter wandered away from the box and headed over to the safes.

  “Americium, mostly.”

  Peter grinned. “Why don’t you just try holding water in a sieve? As I recall, that stuff has a half-life shorter than your kid’s attention span.”

  Dawn grunted. “This is a problem. With a ten-hour half-life, you might well invent a revolutionary super-conductor compound, but if you go to lunch at the wrong time you miss it, and the results are dang near impossible to replicate. Oh, well, if that doesn’t work”—and Peter saw her grin—”I might try something simpler, like cold fusion.”

  Peter chuckled. “I can see your point. Well, I hope it works out,” Peter said. “You’ve got to graduate from this place before she starts her freshman year, or people will talk. Anything new in here?”

  “Not that I’ve seen,” Dawn said absently. “They took out most everything but the project stuff in there.”

  “So I see,” Peter said, his eye falling on a series of little lead canisters all labeled “americium tetrafluoride.” There were enough canisters that Dawn wasn’t likely to miss one of them, and each was small enough that it would get the attention of anything that liked radiation. Fighting down a twinge of guilt, he palmed one of the canisters, and tucked it in his pocket without Dawn seeing.

  Then he leaned over and placed two more tracers on the shelf containing the canisters and on the bottom of the bigger safe. “So, Dawn,” he said, “when are you going to come have dinner with us?”

  “Oh, Pete, you know how it is,” she muttered, still intent on what she was doing in the fabricator. “It’s all I can do to drag Ron away from the computers—or his baby daughter.” She smiled. “Maybe you ought to make a date with her.”

  “Better not,” Peter said, straightening up. “MJ would get after me for chasing younger women. Listen, if I don’t see you before then, I’ll see you when classes start again, huh?” He waved at the baby. “Bye, gorgeous!”

  “Urgle,” she commented as he shut the door behind him.

  A short while later he was changed into his spider-suit and entered the ducts of the science building. He had leisure to think about a lot of things as he moved stealthily from place to place, checking the ducts to see that they were as he remembered them, peering into this room, out that window. How he really needed to call Aunt May, how he had forgotten to pick up the Woolite again, about many other things. But none of them could quite take his mind away from the little lead canister webbed at his waist. The skin under it itched.

  He knew, of course, that there was no possibility of the substance in the canister causing the itch. The canister was solid, the radioactivity inside was fairly low. Nonetheless, he imagined he felt it.

  Very slowly, afternoon shaded into evening. Offices started to be locked, lights began turning off, and people went off to dinner. Thinking that a view from outside might be wiser than a view of the inside, Spider-Man took this opportunity to make his way cautiously out of the ducts and back up into the main building, into the little broom closet that looked down on the annex. Its grimy window, when you pushed the sash up, would be more than big enough to let him out. Inside it, he couldn’t be seen. He waited there, while the shadows lengthened and leaned toward dusk—

  —and something twinged inside him, just faintly, just once: the taste of danger coming.

  The chemical has worn off, Spider-Man thought happily. His pulse started to pick up. My spider-sense is returning! He didn’t even mind that the faint tingle meant trouble was coming.

  Outside the window, he heard that faint telltale whine of very small, very sophisticated jet engines.

  He couldn’t even wait for it to get completely dark, he thought. Impatient cuss.

  Spidey leaned forward to watch the jetglider settle into the courtyard, with the eerie shape of Hobgoblin standing on top of it. His back was to Spider-Man.

  “It’s showtime!” Spidey said softly to himself as, very gently and very quietly, he eased the little window open.

  Now this is going to be interesting, Spidey thought. While the Nuclear floor of that building had windows, they were very few and small. Most of the light came in via glass brick. Hobby, though, seemed undaunted. He jockeyed the jetglider around to the rear end of the building, where the least important equipment was sited, and very straightforwardly flung a pumpkin bomb at the outside wall.

  A tremendous explosion shook the building, and the rear wall fell away in ruins. Alarms started ringing, but Hobby obviously didn’t care about those. He zipped in through the opening.

  Just as I thought, Spider-Man thought as he leapt from the open window and swung across the courtyard. Somebody told him where things were. What to worry about damaging, what not to care about.

  Hurriedly, Spider-Man began webbing almost the entire outside of the building, except for the opening Hobby had blown in the back side. The webbing was in the garden-spider tradition, a fairly fine-meshed network anchored to the ground all around. Spidey leapt and bounced from place to place, very glad that he had restocked his web-shooters earlier in the day. When all the rest of that side of the building was covered, he went to the hole and threw a similar webbing across it. He was barely half done when Hobgoblin appeared on his jetglider. He hovered behind the web mesh, staring at Spider-Man with a look of shock on his face.

  Spidey was slightly shocked, too, for Hobby had cabled the bigger safe to the bottom of his rocket sled, and to Spidey’s astonishment, the jetglider was actually managing to lift the thing off the ground.

  “All right, Hobby,” Spider-Man said as calmly as he could. “Put it back where you found it.”

  Hobgoblin’s incredulous expression didn’t last long. A nasty grin spread over his face. “Surely you jest, Spider-Man,” he said, laughing. He pulled out another pumpkin-bomb and lobbed it casually at the nearest wall.

  There was another huge explosion. Brick and broken pieces of equipment flew in all directions, and Spider-Man felt a moment’s extreme unhappiness over how much it was all going to cost to replace. “Ta-ta, bug,” said Hobby as the smoke cleared, and without hesitation, he and his jetglider zoomed straight at the hole he had made.

  He should have hesitated. As soon as Hobgoblin came through the hole he’d made, he ran into Spidey’s trap full tilt. The webbing caught and held him. Spider-Man moved in fast to finish the job, parting his webbing and leaping through the first hole. From behind, he webbed Hobby up like a neat package. Hobgoblin thrashed and swore, but it did him no good. Within a few seconds, all he could do was glare mutely at Spider-Man, so tightly webbed from toes to mouth that there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t reach a bomb to throw, nor deliver any shock from his energy-gauntlets that would do anything but fry himself. The jetglider, tethered now, thumped to the floor with its leaden cargo.

  “Now then,” Spider-Man said gently. “You and I have things to discuss.”

  “Perhaps,” said a deep voice from behind him. “But we think our conversation with this—thing—takes precedence.”

  Spider-Man turned. There, silhouetted against the webbing and the opening Hobby had made, stood Venom. The symbiote slowly grinned, his terrible snakelike tongue reaching toward Hobgoblin.

  “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Spider-Man said, annoyed, “or people will talk. This is just a good old-fashioned garden variety theft of nuclear materials. Nothing for you to concern yourself about—”

  “We think not,” Venom said, stepping slowly toward Hobgoblin, who was so thoroughly wrapped up that he couldn’t even speak. Instead, he made nervous, placating-sounding grunting noises.

  “T
he very fact that he is thieving nuclear material,” Venom said, “makes plain what he’s been up to. The other ‘us’ that we’ve been hearing reports of has also been thieving such material, has he not?” Slowly he drew closer to Hobgoblin. “So you kill two birds with one stone. You fulfill whatever nasty mercenary criminal scheme you’re working on at the moment, and you also throw the blame on someone else. And they eat it up, don’t they? The media.” Venom smiled his awful fangy smile, and the symbiote drooled in anticipation. “No one has ever dared try anything quite so audacious with us. Such action on your part would seem to argue that you are weary of your life. That being the case—”

  Tendrils from the symbiote streamed off him, grabbed Hobby, webbing, glider, safe and all, picked him up, and shook him as another man might shake someone by the lapels of a jacket. “Before we julienne the flesh off your bones and tie it in bow-knots while you watch—we want to know why?”

  Hobgoblin made muffled, desperate noises. Venom’s dark tentacles begen to edge themselves like razors. They descended on the webbing—sliced it, ripped it, shredded it away.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” Spider-Man cried. “It took a little doing to get him that way!” He leapt at Venom to pull him off from behind.

  Venom’s hands were occupied. Some of his tendrils whipped around to deal with Spider-Man—still razor edged, deadly as any knives. Spidey ducked away from them, and managed—but only because Venom was distracted—to throw some of his own webbing around Venom this time.

  The struggle that followed was a chaotic sort of thing—Venom tearing at the web, his tentacles wriggling and streaming out from between the strands, trying to reach Spidey, Spidey throwing more web over it all, desperately hoping he wasn’t about to run out after all he’d just used on the building. The two of them danced to and fro, spraying webs, cutting webs, tendrils clutching, being tangled, freeing themselves and being tangled again—