Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Someone cleared his throat. MJ’s head snapped around. Her first thought was, Oh Lord, I’ve disturbed a burglar.

  It was worse than that.

  Over against the living-room window, black pseudopodia wreathing gently around him, stood Venom.

  The blood started rushing around inside MJ, but not to her fear-clenched stomach, as she would normally have expected—instead, it went to her face with anger. Hardly knowing what she was doing, she chucked her keys over onto the telephone table and strode straight over to him.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, in ringing tones, “but I must have messed up my appointments calendar again. I wasn’t expecting you. Or did you call to make an appointment first?”

  That dreadful grin looked somewhat fixed at the moment—as if by brief surprise. “We did call,” he said. “Your cell phone, we believe. But we fear we did not leave a message.”

  “People who hang up on answering services,” MJ said, looking Venom up and down, more with Glaive’s scorn than her own, “are a symptom of the downfall of civilization. If you’re rude to machines, you’ll be rude to people, too. And breaking into people’s homes is also fairly rude, by the way. But now that you’re here, won’t you sit down? And can I get you something?” Venom opened his mouth. She didn’t give him the chance. “And no wisecracks about my husband, please, since that’s doubtless the cause of you giving me the pleasure of your company. Tea? Coffee?”

  “Nothing right now,” Venom said. MJ looked pointedly, as if expecting something. Very slowly, the pseudopodia wreathing around him, Venom added, “Thank you.”

  He sat down.

  MJ turned her back on him, something she would never have done—but Glaive would have. She strode away from him into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and got out the baloney and some mustard. “If you called my cell phone,” MJ said, “I would guess it has something to do with the fact that someone cloned the poor creature. Ran up a four-thousand-dollar bill, too. Did you have something to do with that?” She stared at him. Venom opened his mouth, and MJ turned away again, ignoring him. “No,” she said, getting out a knife for the mustard, “even you wouldn’t sink that low. I apologize for suggesting it. Are you sure you won’t have a sandwich?”

  “What I would like,” Venom growled, “is to see your husband.”

  “He’s not at home,” MJ said. She composed her sandwich, put it on a plate, got herself a Coke, took them both to the little dining-room table, put them down, and sat down. She did not eat. Her mother had always told her it was rude to eat in front of people who weren’t also eating, unless they were family. She looked at Venom.

  He actually twitched—he, not the symbiote.

  The sound of a key in the lock came from outside. All the blood in MJ attempted to relocate itself, again, in relief, but she refused to make any other sign, except to lounge back in the chair a little. The other key went into the other lock. The door opened, and Peter came in. “Hey, MJ, did you—”

  He stopped. He saw his wife sitting at the table, with a slight smile on her face, and Venom sitting on the couch.

  Venom stood up. “We have a guest,” MJ said. “Or guests.”

  Peter moved slowly toward Venom, his face going dark with anger. “What are you doing here—”

  Venom stood up, seeing at last a reaction that he understood, and headed toward Peter. “Your wife’s phone number,” he growled, “appears among numbers belonging to some Russian criminals who are working in town at the moment. They appear to be involved with the covert restructuring of CCRC—and with Doctor Octopus.”

  Peter stopped, his mouth open. “Ock—”

  “It is difficult to say,” said Venom, “but he may be one of the owners of CCRC. Or the owner. Unfortunately, much of the pertinent information is concealed by Liechtenstein banking laws, and many shell companies.”

  “Lord,” Peter said.

  Venom’s pale eyes turned in MJ’s direction. “Is it true that your wife’s phone was cloned—”

  “Ask me,” MJ said, the Glaive voice again, and it was the character, not her, that made her shake her hair back when Venom turned to her, and lift her head defiantly. “What makes you think I would bother lying to you?”

  Venom simply looked at her, then turned away. “So—a false trail. Well enough. We would personally much prefer the leisure to finally settle up accounts with you here and now. But there is other information much more important to be discussed, and a much more important reason why we’ve come here.”

  He quickly told Peter about his evening’s foraging in the Bothwell offices possibly belonging to the man called Niner—or, on the other hand, to Doctor Octopus. MJ’s eyes got wide as Venom told of what sounded like extensive shipments of covert nuclear material making their way around the country. “Useless as they often are, this must be dealt with by the authorities,” Venom said. “Spider-Man has certain connections in the AEC offices in New York that we do not—and we think he had better alert them, and seek their help.”

  Peter eyed Venom suspiciously. “You could call them yourself. Why put me on the spot?”

  “As if they would listen to me,” Venom said. “While you—”

  “—are as involved as you were with the near explosion of a nuclear device under Manhattan, as far as they’re concerned. Why should they listen to me, either? There are still people in the office there who suspect I might have been at the bottom of the whole thing.” Then Peter paused. “Well,” he said, “I suppose it’s worth a try. The stakes are too high not to try, anyway. And the worst that can happen is that they’ll chuck me out on my ear. But Doc Ock—” He brooded a moment. “If all the events of the past few months are somehow traceable to him…”

  “That will have to be looked into as well,” Venom said, “but right now the main priority is that all this atomic material be found and made safe before millions of innocent people are caught in some kind of disaster—accidentally, or on purpose.”

  “I’ll call them first thing in the morning.”

  “Very good. And we want you to understand that that information had best be shared with us promptly.” Venom turned a long look on MJ. She returned it, with interest, as coolly as she could. She refused to look at Peter at the moment, who was already doing a slow burn. The last thing anyone needed right now was for these two to go for each other’s throats. “Otherwise, we should dislike having to call on you at home again.”

  “The feeling’s mutual,” Peter said.

  “We will call you in the morning, then,” said Venom. He turned toward the window he had come in by, and then left.

  It was a few seconds before MJ could move; then Peter’s arms were around her. She hugged him back, wordless, as Glaive suddenly became just a character in a bad script again, and her stomach clenched with sudden postponed fear, and her appetite left her with a rush. “Oh, Pete—!”

  “It’s all right,” he said, hugging her. “It’s all right.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said mournfully. “My sandwich is getting all curly at the edges.”

  Peter shot a glance at it. “If you don’t want it, I’ll eat it. Tell me about your day, which obviously was a doozy, and then let’s go to bed—‘cause we’re going to have a busy day tomorrow.”

  EIGHT

  THE next morning, about ten, Spider-Man swung quietly down onto the roof of the New York City offices of the AEC. A small, stout man in a quiet business suit was standing there, a little ruffled by the wind, waiting for him.

  Spidey walked over to him. “Mr. Laurentz?”

  “That’s right,” said the little man. He looked at Spider-Man in a considering way, and Spidey considered him back: bald, an olive cast to his complexion that suggested the Mediterranean, bushy mustache. “Please call me Rob. Do you want to come down to the offices? Or would you rather talk up here?”

  “Which would be wiser?” Spidey said.

  Laurentz smiled suddenly, a surprisingly loopy grin. “It’s a nice morning. Let’s si
t up here.”

  Spidey looked around for chairs, saw none: but Laurentz had already strolled over to the parapet that ran around the edge of the building, and sat down on it, with considerable disregard for the effect of roof dirt on such an expensive suit. Spider-Man went after him and sat down too.

  “You’ll understand, I guess,” said Laurentz, “that there are some—doubts about your bona fides here and there in the organization. I’m not overly concerned, though. I know enough about what happened down in the tunnels not too long ago to make me glad to shake you by the hand. And if there’s anything I can help you with, it’s my pleasure.”

  “That’s a relief.” Spidey looked out across the city and started to explain what was on his mind.

  Laurentz sat quietly for a while, letting Spider-Man expound, particularly regarding the large amount of fissionable material that seemed to be running around loose. “Well, you know,” he said at one point, “there was always a lot more of it than we’re generally told about—or that the public is generally told about—being shipped here and there. All under tight government control, of course. The Commission is supposed to be informed about them all, but, well, we’re a civilian organization, and the military, which handles its own shipping, doesn’t always tell us everything. One of the aspects of this job that occasionally makes it a little interesting.”

  “I just bet.”

  Laurentz sighed a little. “We’ve been investigating CCRC, of course—or what’s left of it—ever since those first barrels of toxic waste were found downtown. To date we’ve found six other stockpiles scattered here and there around Manhattan: smaller ones, but significant enough. And they weren’t just of waste—they were enriched uranium and processed transuranics.”

  “Bomb-grade transuranics?”

  “Some refined plutonium, yes, but not a whole lot. Enough to cause a disaster if it got out into the environment, though. You couldn’t make an H-bomb out of it all if you tried.” Laurentz’s brow furrowed. “But light bombs, yes. And if I were a terrorist, that’s what I would go for. They’re the wave of the future.”

  Spider-Man gulped. “Excuse me—‘light’ bombs?”

  “Sounds like a marketing ploy, doesn’t it?” Laurentz’s smile was mirthless. “I’d love to kick the man or woman who came up with that asinine name. For a while, the other name for them—not much better—was ‘neutron bombs.’”

  “Oh,” Spidey said softly. “Why are these the preferred flavor all of a sudden?”

  “Cheaper,” Laurentz said. “You need less trigger material. Just be sure you understand what we’re talking about here. There was a lot of confusion about this end of weapons technology—the idea that these weapons wouldn’t destroy buildings, only people.” He laughed, a bitter breath of nonamusement. “The first models of this bomb were designed as a tactical weapon, a battlefield nuke. The idea was this: If you’re in the middle of a large armored combat and you drop a conventional nuclear weapon over or on it, obviously everything at ground zero is going to be destroyed. But out at sort of ground one-and-a-half, things won’t be quite so grim, at least for a while. Soldiers in tanks are afforded some protection by their tanks from the blast and heat of the direct explosion, and so afterwards they’re likely—so the generals would think—to just keep on soldiering for a day or three longer until the symptoms of radiation sickness start catching up with them. Well, the generals didn’t like that idea much, so they got behind the idea of designing a bomb that would release such a massive blast of neutrons that the tanks would be no more protection than tissue paper, and the soldiers would die at least within hours, if not right away.”

  “Nice people,” Spider-Man murmured.

  They sat quiet for a moment, watching a flight of ducks make its way up the East River in a vee. “Yes,” said Laurentz. “Well, anyway, as it always does, word got out. There were some astonishingly mishandled press briefings about the ‘neutron bomb’ in ’78, followed by some astoundingly sensationalistic coverage in the media. Such a stink went up from the public that the research was very quietly dropped in late ’78, and for a long while nothing else was heard about it.”

  Spidey nodded. “I take it, though, that now, for whatever reason, people are getting interested again.”

  “Budget,” said Laurentz, “what else? And additionally, there have been enormous leaps in technology since 1978, making the ‘light bombs’—‘tidies,’ they also call them—a lot more practical. And the concrete technology on which to base them is already everywhere, in the storehouses of every atomic power. NATO has a lot of artillery-fired atomic projectiles—‘hundred-pounders,’ they call them. They use pretty small amounts of fissile material, and they’re very flexible and easy to use. They’re not much bigger than a mortar shell. You can shoot them or just hide them with a timer, and when they go off, their normal output of radiation is increased many times by the tamping and pumping techniques that we’ve invented over the years to reduce the size of much larger bombs.”

  “We’re so inventive,” Spidey said.

  “We are,” said Laurentz, “and it gets worse. It would be—well, not easy, but certainly feasible—to build such bombs so that they were much more effective than the NATO weapons. Radiation ‘tamp’ hasn’t been extended to anything like its maximum efficiency as yet, and materials technology continues to produce alloys and metals that are more and more effective for tamping. You could boost one of those battlefield nukes to thousands of times its present rad output—possibly tens of thousands of times. Blow something like that up in a large city, and you wouldn’t notice any more of a bang than you might get out of, say, a couple of tons of chemical explosive. A few buildings would be flattened, a lot of windows blown out. But a hundred-pounder with a little imaginative augmentation…” Laurentz looked off toward the river with a grim expression on his face. “Put something like that where we’re sitting, and you could leave half the population of Manhattan with LD50, the lethal dose, in a flash. Three days, they’re dead. Less, for most of them.”

  “Do you really think that many terrorists have this kind of weapon?”

  “Have it? Maybe. But would they use it?” Laurentz shrugged. “I’ve had a little training in this—most of us at the Commission have. Their feeling, and I share it, is that, at the moment, I doubt most terrorist organizations—ones with a plan, that is, a goal to achieve, I don’t mean random crazies—I don’t think they would dare. I think most of them have the sense to know that the first person or country to use nuclear weapons against a target is going to have the entire rest of the world community—most especially including the nuclear powers—come down on it like a rock. That organization would then have open season declared on it. They’d be hunted down mercilessly and wiped out—possibly their host country as well. By and large, I think terrorists want to inspire terror, not rage. Rage makes people fight back; terror is supposed to make them tired, to make them say ‘Let’s give up and go home.’ At least, that’s how I think the logic would go. But all it takes is one person who doesn’t understand the logic, and—whoomf.”

  “It must be a constant worry.”

  “Oh yes. And worse than ever, after things broke loose in what was left of the USSR, and fissile material started making its way out into the hands of people you really wish didn’t have it.” He smiled, just a little. “Fortunately, the laws of nature are working with us a little bit on this one. Most people who try to work with transuranics don’t have the training. They’re working on a shoestring, in secret. Most of them are so lacking in expertise that, very quickly, while taking apart a shell or trying to build a bomb, they get contaminated by the fissile, and it kills them and everyone around them fairly quickly, and very painfully. It’s something of a deterrent.”

  Spidey gulped again. “I just bet,” he said softly.

  A barge made its way down past the Delacorte Fountain’s white plume of water: they watched it go, hooting at an approaching tug. “The point at which you get into trouble,” L
aurentz said, “is when you have good scientists working with the fissiles—people who won’t have the good grace to drop a canister and LD50 themselves. People with access to money, and to the expensive specialized equipment that you need to work with fissiles safely. This is why the U.S. has been trying to hire as many former USSR scientists as it can, at the best rates, to keep them away from other countries who might be interested in building a little surprise for their neighbors.”

  Spidey nodded, saying nothing. His mouth was dry.

  Doctor Octopus, he thought.

  Ock was one of the premier scientists in the world, it had to be said, and radiation was his area of expertise. There was no ignoring the man’s genius. He would not drop any canisters, nor would he hire anyone who was likely to—or keep them on, after they’d done it once. His perfectionism would be offended, and he’d have them taken out and “neutralized” on the spot. And if there was anything else that Ock did have, it was money. Lots and lots of money, some of it earned from his career as a scientist prior to the accident that bonded him with his tentacles, most of it from the countless thefts he’d masterminded in the years since. He would have more than enough to buy himself, openly or covertly, all the machinery he could possibly need for this kind of work. And all the helping hands he’d need.

  “What kind of luck have you had tracing the material that you know of being illegally shipped around the country?” Spidey said.

  Laurentz shook his head regretfully. “Not a great deal. Our normal sources have dried up rather dramatically over the past few months, as if someone had put the fright on them pretty conclusively. One piece of information did slip out: some fissile, which we’re still trying to locate and seize, was given to a couple of small midwestern right-wing ‘patriot’ groups, for ‘protection.’” That mirthless laugh again. “Some members of one group got curious, and peeked into Pandora’s box—tried to take one of the bombs apart. Unfortunate. Only for them, anyway; the thing didn’t detonate.”