Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Spidey elbow-walked in the direction from which the pseudopod had come, and pulled some of the reeds aside. He found himself looking directly into Venom’s fanged face; not the most charming view.

  “Now,” Venom said. “Where were we?”

  “You can’t be serious!” Spider-Man said. “Didn’t you hear those people? They’re going to blow something up. Don’t you think it might be nice to find out what, just in case there are some people on site who’d rather not be blown up with it?”

  Venom looked at him coldly. “If we thought you were half as concerned for the innocent as you pretend to be…”

  “We don’t have time for this conversation right now. And, I might ask, what brings you here?”

  “It was close to here that we lost the Lizard last night,” Venom said, sounding annoyed. “About two miles south, to be precise. But we have other reasons to be here.”

  “Something to do with that little hot-box in there, huh?” said Spidey, nodding toward the hammock.

  “Is it there indeed?” said Venom.

  “Is what there?”

  “The base from which your precious Lizard has been working. We thank you for the information.”

  Oh Lord, Spider-Man thought. What have I told him? But aloud he said, “Glad to be of help. But don’t you think we have something a little more important to think about just now? What are those guys going to blow?” Then the thought came to him, and his mouth fell open under the mask as he made a little strangled noise that made Venom shoot him a suspicious look. “Oh my God,” he whispered. “It’s tomorrow morning. Only a few hours from now.”

  “What?”

  “The Shuttle launch! They’ve got plenty of time to get there.”

  “What is this about the Shuttle?” Venom said.

  Spider-Man told him, quickly, about the security breaches at Kennedy. “Something funny is going on,” he said finally. “There’s something very hush-hush about this particular launch, despite the fact that they’re trying to make it look like there’s not. Now, these guys are going off saying they’ve got ‘something to blow’—it can’t be a coincidence.”

  “That may be,” Venom said, getting up. “But we’ve let them gain enough distance. And we have other concerns. Craft very like that amphibian are being used to smuggle certain substances in and out of this country, under circumstances that will endanger many more people than a Shuttle launch gone awry.” And he leapt off eastward after the people in the boats.

  Spidey went after him. “I wouldn’t bet on it!” he said, as, going low and carefully, they chased the boats east.

  The argument went on for a good while. Those boats were moving fast, but they couldn’t do better than thirty or forty miles an hour in the clear, and this was not the clear. They had to pick their way, zigzagging from canal to stream to canal again. The amphibious vehicle did better, going up and over firm ground sometimes, but mostly for speed’s sake, it stayed in the water as well. Spider-Man and Venom were able to keep up with them at a safe distance.

  Nearly an hour went by, and part of another. Then a much broader stripe of water lay in the near distance before them. “It’s the Miami Canal,” Spider-Man said. The boats were racing down a smaller waterway ahead of them, heading for where it met the canal.

  “This goes north and south, does it not?” Venom said.

  “That’s right. Northward it empties into Lake Okeechobee, and connects to the river and canal network northward. Southward it heads for Miami and the Intercoastal Waterway.”

  The boats roared into the canal—one group heading north, the other south. “Come on, Venom!” Spider-Man said. “The Shuttle!”

  They were leaping along the southern bank of the smaller canal which joined the Miami. “No,” Venom said, “we think not. Our business takes us south. Besides, if you and we both go north, who will follow those? And as you say—who knows what they may be about to blow?”

  Spidey stopped for a moment then, and looked at Venom. “Good hunting, then,” he said.

  Venom chuckled. “Oh, we always have good hunting. And after we deal with them—let’s see how you like being the hunted.”

  He leapt off southward and swiftly vanished into the moonlit landscape. Meanwhile, the other flatboats were buzzing off northward. Spider-Man said a word under his breath, one that super heroes should not be heard saying. Nearby, a frog said reproachfully, “Ribbit.”

  Spidey breathed out, just a breath of a laugh, and took off after the boats.

  * * *

  ANOTHER two hours passed. The boats went on through the night, and Spider-Man followed. He was getting very, very tired. Only his spider-strength was keeping him going now, and even a spider’s patient, mindless endurance would be tried by keeping a pace like this. At about the two-hour point, the boats stopped, and he stopped too, watching. The pause was only a brief one—they were refueling from gas drums cached on a reedy island. Spider-Man crouched under a cypress, about a quarter-mile behind, and watched, panting.

  Heaven only knew how many miles he had covered since parting with Venom. Not that that had made Spidey very happy, either; the thought of what Venom might be getting up to down south somewhere, for what purposes, made him twitch. But what made him twitch more was the image of something bad happening to the Endeavour, something much worse than woodpeckers.

  The boats started up again, headed northward. He followed.

  The canal network of mid-Florida is a tangled thing, full of unexpected connections. Once it was much used for freight; now pleasure boats plied it constantly, and local county authorities were constantly digging new connections, with their eye on the tourist industry. It was possible to go from the Everglades to Lake Kissimmee completely by the inland route. But the people whom Spider-Man was pursuing didn’t opt for that. Instead, once clear of the Miami cityplex, they “hung a right” out of Lake Okeechobee into the Saint Lucia Canal, which comes out in Saint Lucia Inlet. From there they headed up the eastern coast, on the inside of the Intercoastal Waterway, in the shadow of the long thin island which runs just down the eastern coast sheltering the Florida mainland from the sea. Spider-Man followed them.

  Many times Spidey wished he were driving; other times he wished he could just stop and catch a bus. Still, he plowed onward through marshland and grassland, swinging from high-tension towers and radio masts and buildings when they were handy, and bounding through wetland and dry land when they weren’t—upsetting the wildlife and the occasional late driver who saw him. But a lot besides wildlife will be upset if I don’t get to Kennedy when these people do…

  Spider-Man was sure that was where they were going. He became even more certain when, at Cocoa Beach, they veered even farther inland on the west side of Banana Island, and ran up the coast near Titusville and Mims, making for the northernmost, unrestricted part of the Cape. That clinches it, Spidey thought, and concentrated on narrowing the gap.

  He was slowing down, though, and he knew it. What frightened him more than anything else was when he heard the engines stop. He had been tracking by sound; he would have to rely on sight again.

  He caught a flicker of motion off in the flat wetland, toward Kennedy. Tonight, the lights were on down there. Pad 39-A had all the big Xenon spots trained on the Shuttle. There it stood, looking small at this distance, but blazing jewel-like in white and black and the orange of the main fuel tank. Between it and him, Spidey could see running forms, crouching, going fast.

  He went after them. After a very short time, Spider-Man found himself looking at a barbed-wire fence, with a sign nearby that said U.S. Government Property. Trespassing Prohibited. In the fence, someone had cut a hole big enough to let two people go through at once. Spider-Man stopped. He could hear no alarms, no sounds of trouble of any kind—and that was the worst news of all. They were in, and somehow nobody knew about it. Isn’t there some kind of perimeter security out here? Spidey wondered, as he leapt the fence and went after the mercenaries. Or have the damn budget cuts aff
ected that, too?

  Softly, ahead of him, something went BOOM.

  Leaping was the only form of locomotion left to him at this point; in this vast flatness, there was nothing tall enough for him to swing from. Away Spidey went, at top speed. As he went, he hurriedly got out Murray’s widget again, and slipped it over his head. He had to stop just for a moment, to readjust.

  The moon was no longer a problem: it was high enough in the sky to be out of his view. Endeavour itself, sitting there proud and shining, was not much of a heat source at this point. But the intense hot spotlights shining on 39-A were as unbearable to look at as the sun. Spider-Man turned the gain down, and then cautiously adjusted the scope’s heat levels.

  There. Four or five shapes, running, white, silhouetted against the indigo and super-dark green of the grass. They were running away from a blocky shape that radiated some residual heat—not at body temperature, but lower. A building. From it a glowing fog billowed upward.

  Spidey bounced toward it as fast as he could. As he approached it, he could see more shapes, brighter, hotter ones—jeeps, glowing brightest from under the hoods and at the exhausts. They came roaring toward him down a service road from the direction of 39-A. Yellow hazard lights flashed on them. He could hear sirens. Searchlamps scanned ahead of them.

  Spider-Man came around the corner of the building and stopped, shocked to see the amount of heat it was radiating. A bomb of some kind had exploded against the side of it, and had made a huge crater in it. Whether the building housed someting vital, he couldn’t tell. He turned.

  Over his head, Spider-Man heard the whistle of a single bullet, and then a fraction of a second later, the crack! of its firing. Spidey stood very still and put his hands in the air as the spotlights of the approaching jeeps came to rest on him.

  Three jeeps pulled up, and shortly Spider-Man found himself surrounded by more pointing guns than he ever wanted to see. Some of the people in the jeeps were in Air Force uniform, and others were wearing NASA windbreakers, and they all looked very grim indeed.

  Four people got out of the jeeps and came over to him slowly: three men and a woman. “Who are you,” said the man in the lead, a NASA security man, “and what are you doing here?”

  “Before we get into that,” Spider-Man said, “it’s not me you want, it’s those eight people who just scattered in all directions after doing this.” He glanced at the building. “They’re probably re-forming up behind you even as we speak. This wasn’t anything important, was it?”

  “We’re not going to discuss that with you,” said the man. “But all the same—” He looked at the people in one of the other jeeps and jerked his head back toward the way they had come. That jeep took off, and someone in it started talking rapidly into a walkie-talkie as they went. “Now,” the man said. “About you—”

  “I’m Spider-Man,” he said, “and I’m here about your hydrogel.”

  The people with the guns looked blank. But the man who had spoken, and the woman, in Air Force uniform, exchanged a shocked glance. “Yes,” Spidey said. “The stuff the Lizard stole from your boat the other night. The stuff that’s supposed to go up on the Shuttle this morning.”

  Silence. The man and woman looked at him. “The Lizard,” Spidey said impatiently. “Big green guy? About six feet? Scales? Tail?”

  The woman stepped forward. “A friend of yours?”

  “People keep asking me this,” Spider-Man said. “Let’s just say he’s an acquaintance. I know where the hydrogel is, and how it can be gotten back to you. But rather more to the point, what are you going to do about those people? They do not mean well, I’m here to tell you—if you need more evidence than this.” He jerked a thumb at the cratered building. “And if you don’t go after them, something very bad may happen. They just made a very concerted effort to kill me and someone else I know earlier this evening, because we were in a position to overhear what they had in mind. They said they were going to blow something.”

  The man turned quickly to the woman. “Let’s put him under guard and get out of here. We’ve got a situation.”

  She looked at Spider-Man—a cool look out of a still, pretty face. “No,” she said. “He’s coming with us.”

  “But he just broke in here!”

  “I don’t believe so. Put a guard on him if you like, but put him in our jeep. He’s coming with us. You,” she said to Spider-Man, “if you please—you have some explaining to do. Tell us who those people are, and make it quick.”

  NINE

  THE moon was gaining height when the mercenaries split, one group going north and the other south. Venom went after the southbound ones, in a very mixed mood.

  He had been ready to kill Spider-Man again, and once again he had been distracted from that. It was a perfectly straightforward intention, and he couldn’t understand what kept going wrong with it. If he had been of a less materialistic turn of mind, or more superstitious, Venom would have suspected there was some bad planetary aspect in his horoscope these past couple of months. Or maybe it was sunspots. All around him he could feel the symbiote twitching with frustration. It had been so close to a satisfying, messy, violent end for its worst enemy, and the sweet satisfaction of dining on part, or more likely, all of Spider-Man, before the night was out. Now once again it would have to wait.

  Be patient, Venom said within himself. It’ll be worth it. When this is all over, he will still be there.

  The wave of annoyance that came back to him from the symbiote suggested that it found the reassurance less than satisfying.

  Venom settled into a steady pace along the canal bank, following the mercenaries. He found himself wondering whether the symbiote had started showing any signs of its taste for blood while still with Spider-Man. Was this something these creatures normally developed? Or was this simply a by-product of its thwarted desire to bond with Peter Parker? He supposed it made sense that the symbiote’s desertion by the being for whom it had tailored itself could very well have deranged it. It was Spider-Man’s blood it really wanted, and if it couldn’t have it by way of partnership, it wanted it for lunch. If it couldn’t have Spider-Man’s, it would have other people’s. This was not a substitution that made it really happy, but a stopgap measure, until the day it achieved its heart’s desire. And someday it would.…

  Not tonight, though. Venom said silently to his partner. For the moment, we have other business. His group of mercenaries—two of the fan-driven flatboats—sped down the Miami Canal for the better part of an hour, southeastward. He followed them as steadily as he could, alternately bounding and webswinging along the canal’s western bank, occasionally veering inward to avoid a house or a farm. He wished not to be seen by anyone, neither the group he was chasing nor the people in the towns and villages they passed. The innocent could, after all, be easily frightened by them, even though he meant them no harm. As for the guilty, they would see him soon enough. And if Venom had his way, he would leave none of them alive except one, some single messenger, to take his warning back to his masters as before—making it plain what happened to people involved in such ugly business. And I only am returned to tell thee.… Watching the boats skim ahead of him in the moonlight, Venom smiled and continued his pursuit.

  He had been very busy working with various sources in the past few days. Miami’s underworld was full of people who knew more than was good for them, people who tried their best to get their fingers into the pie. It was a town where dirty money was rife, and where at any hour of the day or night you could be sure to find something illicit going on, if you knew whom to ask. Venom knew whom. Or more to the point, he knew how. And he had some help from an unlikely source: the media.

  Word had gone out quite quickly that he was here. As a result, there was almost no illicit bar, numbers parlor, gambling den, or other nest of crime where he would not get instant and terrified cooperation should he put in an appearance. For anyone who had not seen the TV pictures of the spot he had visited on the beach a couple of night
s ago would have heard about it by now. Rumor, decorated with tongues—in this case, one large, slime-drooling, prehensile one—had already gone streaking through the city streets, making its way into the darkest recesses, telling what had been found on that beach, and what shape it was in. Because of this, whenever Venom turned up at some shady address or some dingy alley, or (in other cases) in polished boardrooms or exclusive offices, the inhabitants had been only too glad to talk to him. Some of his informants babbled information so fast that Venom would have been tempted to think they were making it up, except he knew they wouldn’t have dared.

  His investigation of the CCRC connection had proved particularly fruitful. He still found it hard to believe the massive recklessness of the local environment that was embodied in CCRC’s importation of toxic waste here. The people running the corporation must certainly know that when the government caught them—any of them he didn’t take care of himself—they would go to jail, for years and years. But regardless, the sordid business continued. It suggested to Venom either that they thought someone in their organization could protect them from prosecution, or they were going to make so much money that a twenty-or thirty-year prison sentence seemed like an equable price to pay. And that thought made Venom boggle.

  Or perhaps it meant that they seriously didn’t expect to be caught—that they expected prosecution to pass them by. Venom growled, smelling bribery in the air, and the symbiote rippled in response to his anger. How much money, Venom thought, do you have to spend to corrupt a federal grand jury? Or bypass an investigation? Or keep it from ever starting? Incorruptibility was becoming a rare trait these days. If you greased enough hands, no one would be left who could hold justice’s scales. In this case there were doubtless thousands of hands to grease, but if CCRC was making the kind of profits Venom suspected from this tidy little trade, there would be plenty of grease to go around.