Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Now, though, the chandelier was somewhat the worse for wear—as a result of that old fight—and the dust lay thick. No one had been here for a long time.

  Something poked him gently in the ribs. He whirled to see what it was.

  Zzt.

  Huh?

  Zzt.

  “Oh,” he said, and then almost laughed out loud, and stopped himself. It was the sensor, buzzing sporadically against him.

  He took a couple of experimental steps down toward the platform.

  Zzzt. Zzzzzzzzt. Zzzzzzzz.

  Spidey headed that way. The buzzing got stronger. He headed farther on down, until he ran out of platform and had to jump down onto the ancient track. Zzzzzzzz.

  It was getting stronger, the buzzing, and more prolonged. This was definitely not background radiation; he had the sensor set well above that. Spider-Man leaped on down the tracks, going as silently as he could—

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  When he got down to the other end of the platform, the buzzing simply wouldn’t stop. He stood still for a moment, looked around him cautiously with his spider signal.

  Nothing. Bare walls, bare floors.

  Marks in the dust on the terrazzo floor.

  He went over to the marks, bent to examine them more closely. The strength of the buzz got as high as it would go, and a soft light flashed on the sensor to indicate that he needed to decrease the sensitivity setting somewhat if he wanted the buzzer to work properly again. He didn’t move to do so, still looking at the marks.

  Little barrels. Little drums, like we found in the CCRC buildings. And radioactive as heck, if I’m getting this much reading just from the floor and the dust they were standing on.

  The thought was rather intimidating. For the moment, he tried not to breathe. Gone, though, and no way to tell how long ago that happened. Though not a lot of dust has fallen in the scraped places where they were moved. So maybe it didn’t happen too long ago. And they were taken out another way, otherwise I would have seen markings down in the dust at the other end, not to mention picking up the radioactivity.

  He looked to see where the marks led. Down toward the farthest end of the platform. There would have been a stairway here, Spider-Man thought, when it was originally built.

  Maybe there had been; now there was just a wall that had been sealed up the same way as the one he had come in through. The buzzing continued here.

  He reached up to the riveted-on sheet of metal, pulled at it slowly. It gave way, very gradually—finally fell, clanging and echoing, on the marble floor beside him.

  Spider-Man looked through the doorway, into the dark. Zzzzzzzzz, said the radiation sensor.

  “All right,” he said softly, “let’s see where this leads.”

  It led a long way into the dark. The ceiling of the tunnel was low, and the masonry was old at first, then newer. Then the masonry stopped and rock began: plain black basalt, the roots of the city. And then the tunnel sloped downward, often twisting and turning sharply as it went.

  Spider-Man trailed a gloved hand along the wall for a short way. The wall was surprisingly smooth. Laser drilling? he wondered. That kind of thing was incredibly expensive.

  It occurred to Spidey that there were, once again, entrepreneurs in New York willing to spend a lot of their own money—well, somebody’s money—on private construction projects. And the way the tunnel twisted, sometimes almost back on itself, suggested that someone had been using satellite guidance, or some other similar system, to avoid the foundations of other buildings, entries to other, older tunnels, cable conduits, etc.

  Spider-Man went on at the best speed he could, trusting his spider-sense to allow him to maneuver safely in this darkness. He had been making his way along for about a mile, he thought, when the tunnel’s downward slope increased more acutely, and its run straightened out a good deal. At this point, Spider-Man stopped and listened very hard. Nothing. His spider-sense had nothing to say to him, either.

  It was getting damp. Surprising how the summer humidity can make it even down here. There’s just no escape, is there? And it was cooler, too. Slowly Spider-Man started on down the tunnel again, going softly, listening.

  Sound began: water. Far off, very soft, a tinkle and drip and splash of water, like the sound you hear in subway stations in wet weather—except that the subway stations, as far as Spidey could tell, should be far above him at this point. Zzzzzzzzt, the sensor sounded against his chest. It had been maintaining a fairly even tone all this while, picking up the traces of where the barrels had passed though this tunnel, here and there spiking a louder ZZZZ when it passed a place where some barrel might have banged against a wall. The contamination, Spider-Man thought, must have been horrendous. If all the barrels were leaking radioactivity like that.…

  He shuddered as he went along. Spidey had a healthy respect for radioactivity, both in its positive and negative aspects. The negative one was most on his mind at the moment, though. It took only a speck of plutonium in your lungs to kill you dead, and not even from radioactivity: the sheer toxicity of the metal was more than sufficient.

  Spider-Man went on, and the sound of the water slowly grew and grew. Then, ahead of him, away down the tunnel, he saw the slightest glow of light: a pale greenish glow, as if from fluorescent tubes. Very quietly, he made for it.

  The pale glow slowly defined a doorway, quite literally a light at the end of the tunnel. He came to the end—

  —and simply had to stop and stare.

  Off to his right, the pathway that flowed into the tunnel he had left continued off around some outcroppings of rock, out of sight. Spider-Man stood at the edge of a wedge-shaped natural cavern nearly three hundred feet across. From high up one of its walls, off to his right, water poured down in a thin stream of waterfall, into a shallow pool. Water splashed up high from this, and flowed away off toward the side of the cavern directly across from him, down and out of sight. The floor was a pincushion tumble of stalagmites, mingled with powdery stuff that had probably fallen from the stalactites above; some of this was a powdery fungus that glowed a faint golden-green. Down the middle of the cavern ran a deep fissure with many shattered stalagmites on either side of it. Maybe not the fault itself, Spidey thought, but a symptom of it. The ceiling was not level; it arched up in a sort of earth-Gothic style, hung with innumerable stalactites, some two hundred feet sheer to a highest, narrowest point, and from that area, though he couldn’t see it directly, came just a spark of real light. Some grille on the sidewalk? Spidey thought. This must be the river they diverted.

  He half wished he had a cell phone, so he could test the cell. I bet the signal would be pretty weak down here.

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz, said the sensor insistently. It felt stronger than it had since down in the almost-a-subway-station.

  Obediently he turned to see in which direction the signal would increase. Off to the right, it got stronger, following the level path that had been cleared through the stalagmites nearest the cavern wall.

  He went cautiously along the path, quietly listening. The water made it hard to hear; the echoes were confusing. Now, though, they began to fade as the cleared path led him through into another tunnel, this one much straighter than the previous one. It ran on straight for nearly a hundred yards and there were lights in it, at intervals.

  Zzzzzzzzzz, said the sensor. Zzazzzaz. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

  It vibrated so hard that it felt slightly indecent, and Spidey stopped briefly to turn its sensitivity down a good ways. Then he went on, but the adjustment lasted only a short time. ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ, ZZZZZZZZZZZ!

  He came to a door. It was made of extremely heavy metal, like an airlock door in a submarine, but the doorknob seemed simple enough. He turned the knob and pulled. Very silently, on well-oiled hinges, the door slowly leaned open.

  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!! bellowed the sensor, and with good reason.

  Spidey looked into a room nearly the size of the cavern
he had just left, all carved out of the living rock. It was piled high with metal drums. Every one of them had a stenciled number on it. Some had old lettering as well: waste, chemical waste, toxic: dispose of appropriately. One, not too far from Spider-Man, said cooking oil.

  I don’t care what it says, Spidey thought to himself grimly, this ain’t no Mazola!

  He started to shut the door. And then his spider-sense screamed.

  Spidey spun around, saw a bunch of black-clad people jumping at him, and knew perfectly well that there was no point in waiting to see if they were going to be friendly. He threw himself in a double-fisted punch at the first one and decked him; rolled, bounced, shot webbing at one of the others, missed; bounced again, trying to get a count.

  Six of them? Seven? There’s no fighting room here. Let’s make the odds a little more even. He bounced hurriedly back down the tunnel toward the cavern, made the entrance, looked up, saw the stalactites.

  It’s worth a shot.

  Gunfire sprayed behind him. And me without my flak jacket, he thought. He looked up again, picked a stalactite, shot webbing at it, felt it anchor. Went up the webline, and swung, while bullets whined all around and spat glowing fungus and rock dust off the surrounding stony icicles.

  Footsteps, echoing, as the guards ran into the cavern. Spidey swung hard around the first stalactite, chose another one, one of the biggest, shot webbing at it, anchored, pulled himself free of the first—

  Suddenly, fire streaked past his ear and blew the other stalactite to powder. Spidey swung hurriedly around the other one, looking to see what the heck that had been.

  A single man had come down the tunnel, the way the others had. He was dressed in jeans and a dark jacket, and he had an RPG launcher over his shoulder, or something that looked very much like it. He drew a bead on Spidey, fired again.

  Spidey launched himself out into the air—he had no desire to be a guest at his own barbecue. The second blast from the RPG ruined the biggest stalactite as Spidey caromed into another one, hung on for dear life, and prepared to move on again in a hurry. That one looks nice, he thought and shot webbing at it, felt it anchor. Better go—

  He swung from the web—and the stalactite detached itself neatly from the ceiling.

  For one bare moment Spider-Man understood, as if from the inside, one of the principles of cartoon physics: you must know you are about to fall before it can actually happen. He seemed to hover there for the split second until he knew—and then, flailing, he went down. Spidey had just enough time to glimpse the really large stalagmite pointing toward where his back was about to land. He twisted spasmodically, just missed it, and crashed into two other smaller, blunt ones. One of them grazed his head. He lolled back, unable to move for a moment, literally seeing stars.

  The black shapes, he could see, were picking their way toward him—

  —and then there was an appalling sound: a scream. Not me, he thought fuzzily for a moment. Too deep.

  He managed to lever himself up on one elbow, look around. The black shapes, at least three of them, were being waved around in the air by long black pseudopodia attached to the usually least welcome, but temporarily most welcome shape in the world. Venom stood there, arms folded as if in amusement over something odd on his chest—Spidey squinted, abruptly recognizing the twin to his own sensor. With a quick, economical gesture, the pseudopodia chucked the three men hard at the cavern wall. They hit it hard and fell, none of them in good shape at all. Venom turned, reached out a very long set of tentacles and snatched the RPG from the man who held it, then snarled, “Niner!” and poured more tentacles at him.

  “Niner” just smiled, let the RPG go, stepped hurriedly back from the extra pseudopodia, and put his hand in his pocket.

  Another appalling scream. Not me. Too high. No, it is me. The sonic scream got inside his head and blasted the world and the inside of his skull white with sound and pain. He just barely saw it starting to rain stalactites, saw the pseudopodia writhing in agony, heard Venom’s scream of sympathy and his own scream of agony. Then for a long time there was nothing left but the screaming, and the pain, and after a while that went away as well.

  * * *

  “—OFF them now and save yourself a lot of trouble, sir.”

  A voice, just a voice in the darkness. Unfamiliar.

  “Oh, no, my faithful ‘ninth arm,’ you misunderstand my intent. I don’t want to save myself trouble. After the Hundredth Day, things are going to be very quiet, except for certain indulgences I permit myself. Like these two. Almost too much to hope for, the second one. I don’t intend to throw away such a piece of good luck. Indeed not.”

  Familiar voice. Too familiar. Can’t move, can’t do anything.

  “You’ve had the guest suite ready all this while. Well, we’ve got an extra guest, it may get a little cramped in there—but we’ll have plenty of time, all the time in the world in fact, to make more room for our extra lodger. Meantime, put them in there together.”

  “Won’t Venom—?”

  “He might. Wouldn’t that be interesting to watch? Still, I doubt he will for a good while yet. I don’t intend to waste their entertainment value so quickly. Not for a long time, certainly—maybe never. We’ll see. Anyway, we’ll dose them at intervals with enough sonics to keep his alien pet in order. Go on, Niner, put them in the suite. We’ve got a few other things to do this afternoon before we can enjoy ourselves.”

  Joy.

  Make a note. No more stalactites.

  No more… sta…

  TEN

  SPIDER-MAN opened his eyes. It hurt, everything hurt.

  Very slowly and carefully, not wanting to find out too quickly about anything else that hurt, Spider-Man rolled over onto his face. His face hurt, but he had known about that already from the graze with the stalactite. His arms hurt, but not so badly that they didn’t work.

  A good thing, that, since he found himself staring straight at a flaccid, black, shining pseudopod between his face and the floor. It twitched.

  He boosted himself up and away from it in a hurry—then groaned as many other parts of his body complained that they hurt, too, and what was he going to do about it? Spidey shook his head carefully, half afraid he would hear something rattle, and boosted himself into some kind of limp sitting position.

  He looked around. They were in a three-walled room about twenty feet by twenty; it appeared to have been carved out of the same solid basalt as the hallway with the fissile storehouse in it. Floor, walls, and ceiling were all the same dull black. Off to one side was what looked like a black basalt toilet, no seat; in the corner of the room was a little triangular pool of water, like a tiny koi pond set into the floor.

  The fourth wall fascinated Spidey. It shimmered—just a shimmering in the air, like heat haze, with no light, nor a glow—but he was sure he knew what it was anyway. It’s a force field, he thought, a genuine TV-science-fiction force field. He suspected strongly that Doc Ock was out there somewhere, waiting for him to test it. Well, he could wait.

  Beyond the force field was a larger room, barren, with various crates and boxes stacked up in it. Some of Doc Ock’s people, some wearing the “goon uniform” that he first saw way back when Ock was going by the immodest sobriquet of “the Master Planner,” others in more casual clothes. They flitted to and fro, bringing in more crates or taking them away. It looked leisurely; no one was in a rush. Some of the henchpeople threw interested glances in at Spidey, which he declined to return.

  He turned his back on the outside world and examined the cell once more. It looked like it was intended for very hard wear and very extended use. Charming, Spider-Man thought, and looked across at his prone cell mate. Venom lay there sprawled, having been hurt a lot worse by the sonics than Spidey had: the symbiote lay strung out all around him in stricken rags and tatters.

  He disliked the idea of going near the thing, but there didn’t seem any point in letting Venom lie there and rest a perfectly good, if hostile, set of brains
while they could be useful in getting them both out of there. Spidey hunkered himself over closer to Venom, shook his shoulder a little. “Venom. Come on, snap out of it, you big baby.”

  No response.

  “I should think he’d be out of it for a good while,” said the familiar, rasping, gloating voice from behind him. “You’ll be wasting your time. But you’ll have lots of it to waste, from now on.”

  Slowly, Spidey turned around. There stood Doctor Octopus, just outside the force field, looking at him through those bloody sunglasses of his, and smiling. He waved a hand at the field, as if through air. “Don’t you want to try it?”

  “Not in the slightest,” Spider-Man said, “since it’d probably kill me. Or make me wish I was dead. I have this nasty feeling that killing me—us—is not on the menu.”

  “Oh, no, not at all. You two are a guilty pleasure,” said the Doc. “Rather, you are: Venom was an unexpected dividend. But over the next couple of months I intend to spend a lot of time enjoying your reactions to what you see going on around you. Helplessness: the most delicious of emotions which leads to all others—rage, grief, resignation. Though I doubt you’ll come to that too soon.”

  “I’ll resign right now,” Spider-Man said, “if you’ll let me out of here and give me a chance to pound you properly.”

  “Certainly not.” Doc Ock put his hands behind his back, a little primly, and smiled, while the god-awful metal tentacles wreathed and writhed around like squaredancing snakes. “And I intend to watch with enjoyment your attempts to make me angry—what’s the phrase?—‘so that I’ll make a mistake.’ I have been practicing not making mistakes for a long time now.”