Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “You’ve been practicing something, all right,” Spidey said, crossing his legs with a little hiss of pain, and making himself as comfortable as he could. “High finance, mostly. I never thought of you as a banker.”

  “You never thought,” Ock corrected him. “That was always your problem. React first, think things through later. Annoying, how your wretched half-baked thinking would sometimes serve you well enough to interfere with my plans. A long time now I’ve put up with that kind of thing from you. But no more. I intend to demonstrate to you, at leisure, what real thinking can do—and you’ll have leisure to appreciate it.”

  “Is this the part where you gloat over me?” Spidey said.

  “For years,” said Ock, with a smile of pure pleasure. “But, as an exercise for the student, I’m delighted to give you a chance to tell me what’s been going on.”

  “You’re destroying the world?” Spidey said.

  Doctor Octopus chuckled. “What silliness. When the building is burning, you don’t pour on gasoline. You put the fire out.”

  “Oh,” Spider-Man said. “And with terrorists and loonies all over the place trying to get their hands on nuclear material, you’re processing it and shipping it all over the place, here and in Europe, and selling it to anyone who’ll pay, and this is how you put the fire out? An interesting new definition of ‘saving the world’: I hadn’t heard this one before.”

  “I am saving the world,” Doc Ock said calmly. “From the irresponsible populations that are destroying it. When I’m finished, there will be a lot fewer of those populations. But more to the point, I’m gathering every useful technology together into the hands of the people who will use them wisely—”

  “In other words, you.”

  “Perspicacious boy.”

  “Gee, you know big words, Doc.”

  “And what to do with them, insect.” Just for a moment, a glitter of pure hate showed in Doc’s eyes. “In the past twenty years, this world has changed tremendously in terms of scientific advancement. Machines that were unheard of as little as a decade ago are now household appliances—and being misused as often as used properly. The time is ripe for one person to command all the technology.”

  “Nice goal,” Spider-Man said. “The question is, will all those other people let you?”

  “There won’t be that many of them to argue the point,” said Doc Ock, “in a very little while.”

  The chill got into Spidey’s bones at the sound of that.

  “See what’s happened in the world in those twenty years,” Ock said. “The age of the superpower should have come to an end with the collapse of the Soviet Union. There should have been an astonishing leap forward in terms of science and medicine and managing the world, with that shadow lifted. But still small nations squabble and kill each other’s people over wars that were fought and lost five hundred years ago. All the technology is here to make this world a paradise, but the nations of the world just go on wasting their potential. They’ll waste it until there’s nothing left. The time’s now ripe for one person to command the world’s economy, one who’ll use it to best advantage, in science’s service. The greatest scientist ever to live.”

  Spidey cocked his head just slightly sidewise, wondering whether Venom was conscious enough to get any of this. Can’t be. He’d be raving already.

  “All it takes is one man with a vision,” Ock said, “and the world can be changed. Is being changed: the changes are already in progress. A hundred days or less, and no one will know this for the same planet.”

  A hundred days—Spidey thought of that phone call from Galya. “All this money-laundering,” he said casually. “Whose economy are you messing with?”

  “Everyone’s,” said Doc delightedly. “Why leave anyone out? And there are so many ways to do it. Destabilize local currencies by speculation in the local markets. Deflate a country’s cash reserves.”

  “Counterfeiting,” Spidey said, suddenly remembering a little barrel of ink that Venom had found along with other smuggled goods on a Florida beach: the “color-changing” ink used on the new European Community bank notes—called, simply, the Euro—impossible to duplicate, now the most stolen and most expensive substance in the West.

  “Yes indeed. In about a month, the Euro will suffer a most devastating drop in its value when it’s discovered how much of the currency is worthless, unbacked by the member banks. So will the dollar and the yen. The ruble, worth little enough as it is, will go into hyperinflation within minutes. The world’s currencies will go into free fall.”

  “Whole economies will crash,” Spider-Man said softly, horrified.

  “Yes. It will start there. Many wasteful industries will die in that first shakeout—”

  “First.”

  “Well,” said Ock, the extra arms curling and wreathing gently about him, “I always did favor the belt-and-suspenders route. There are simply too many people on this planet. Resources are being wasted faster than they can be replaced. I had given some thought to smallpox and anthrax,” he said, tilting his head a little, as if considering it again, “but they are unreliable agents, and difficult to control. No, the sweet compliance of the atom suits me better. Plutonium doesn’t breed without help, and won’t mutate into some unpredictable new form without warning. I have acquired a fair amount of it, and over time I’ve distributed a great deal of it, here and there, where it’ll do the most good.”

  “All over the country, you mean!”

  “Every major city. City-dwelling has not been good for our planet, by and large,” Ock said judiciously. “Now nearly half this world’s swollen population lives in cities. A moment’s surgery, in a hundred days, and,” he made an airy gesture, “the burden becomes much less. I don’t have a quarrel with simple people who live on the land. I’ll rule them in their best interests, and they’ll provide food and the raw materials we’ll need for the new sciences. At the same time, I don’t want to ruin the cities totally. It’s surgery—or rather, chemotherapy. Kill the cancer, save the body.” He smiled again. “They’ll thank me for a thousand years after.”

  Spidey sat very still. Then, slowly, he got up, and walked as close to that force field as he dared.

  “What gives you the right to do this?” he cried.

  Ock only blinked. “I’m the one best qualified to bring this result about,” he said simply, “and the time is right. Wouldn’t you say?”

  Spider-Man stood there and just shook.

  Doctor Octopus peered past him at Venom, and tsked a little. “I hope I didn’t give him too much,” he said. “Keep an eye on him. This has been very entertaining—I look forward to seeing how he reacts to it.”

  And Otto Octavius walked away, actually whistling to himself.

  Spidey sat down next to Venom, still trembling with rage and fear. For a long time he was silent.

  Then, so softly it was barely a breath of sound, Venom said, “And we thought we knew what madness was like.”

  Spidey, acutely aware that they were probably being watched, pretended to lie back down on his back, not too close to Venom but not too far away from him either, and moaned a little. The moan was genuine enough. After a few long breaths he whispered, “If you’ve got any thoughts on this, I wouldn’t mind hearing them.”

  There was a very soft hiss: after a little while. Venom said, “We should consider our available assets. We ourselves are not entirely out of commission, though holding the symbiote in check is something of a strain at the moment.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Spidey said morosely, “it wants to eat my spleen or something.”

  “It wants to eat all of you,” Venom said, “but at the moment we have no intention of catering to its whims. Later, when we are free, will be another matter. We decline, however, to be entertainment for that crackpot.”

  Spidey paused a moment, thought about that. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s fight.”

  “Your sense of humor is as impaired as ever.”

  “No, I’m se
rious. Venom, listen to me! We didn’t even have to make him angry—he’s already made his mistake.”

  “In what regard?”

  “How much of that did you hear?”

  “To our intense regret, all of it.”

  “He said he built this place for me. Not for you. We’ve got so much history together, he knows my capabilities inside out —but not yours. There may be some weakness in this place that you can exploit that I can’t.”

  There was a long pause. “It is well reasoned,” Venom said softly. “We would suggest you wait an hour or so. The symbiote is indeed somewhat ‘under the weather.’”

  “You’re on.”

  Another pause. “This is not to be taken as a waiver of my statutory right,” said Venom, “to eat your spleen at a later date.”

  Spidey snorted and disguised the sound more or less successfully as a sneeze. “As long as the world doesn’t get blown up,” he said softly, “that suits me fine.”

  Silence.

  Spider-Man lay back and took the single most unsuccessful one-hour nap of his life.

  * * *

  SLOWLY, over the next half hour or so, Venom’s pseudopodia began working again. He pulled himself together over the course of a few minutes: the symbiote knitted itself back into a costume, and then, over another ten minutes or so, began putting new pseudopodia out and making little grabs in Spider-Man’s direction. Spidey let this continue for a little while, then “noticed” it, and withdrew to his own corner.

  What Spidey desperately hoped had escaped the attention of whatever surveillance was turned on them, was that while the pseudopodia were snatching at him, one of them—fined down to a hair, and practically invisible—had been investigating the force field. He had no idea what the results were, but Venom showed no sign of any ill effects, except that the look he was giving Spidey was becoming more ferocious and hungry by the minute.

  Finally he spoke. “This is an opportunity we had not thought to have for a few days yet,” he said. “It seems a shame to waste it—especially as it will be good practice for dealing with that slide-rule pusher when he comes back.”

  Spidey glared at Venom, stood up slowly. “I wouldn’t bet that it’s going to go the way you want,” he said. “It hasn’t before.”

  “There’s always a first time,” Venom said. And he leapt.

  Pseudopodia whirled out and wrapped around Spidey, and he grappled with it in a very mixed state of mind: he did not want to hurt Venom because he was going to need his help later, but he also did not want to be any closer to the symbiote than he had to. They reeled back and forth, they bashed into the walls. At one point, Venom picked Spidey up bodily and dropped him headfirst on the floor, then leapt on him again.

  They grappled and rolled around the floor. Those god-awful fangs dripped slime on Spider-Man and the tongue was everywhere at once. Their faces were close together. The symbiote made a noisy wailing sound. Eddie Brock’s proper human voice whispered in Spidey’s ear, “The force field is permeable. We had to narrow down to less than an angstrom wide, but some got out. With time—the controls—”

  “We’ll see where he keeps them,” Spidey gasped.

  Venom punched him. Spidey, furious, punched him back, then scrambled to his feet, picked Venom up, and threw him at the wall.

  Unfortunately, there was very little room to work in a space like this, and some disadvantages. At one point Venom held his head under water in the corner pool. He struggled for air, gasped and thrashed, and finally got free—only to have the symbiote grab him to do it again. It’s getting too enthusiastic, Spidey thought desperately. Does it even understand the concept that this is a put-on? And if it does, does it care?

  The pseudopodia shoved him under the water again. Nope, Spidey thought, and choked and gasped and came up coughing water, and grabbed Venom and attempted to throw him straight across the horizon. The room actually shook a little when he hit the wall.

  And outside the other wall, Doc Ock was standing, looking pleased. “Goodness,” he said, “I hadn’t thought you’d have had it in you so soon.”

  He glanced over to one side at something. The controls for the force field, Spidey thought, desperately hoping that Venom had seen it, willing him to have seen it. Venom staggered to his feet. “You utter madman,” he growled, stalking toward the force field, “we’ll see shortly if legend is true, that you gain intelligence by eating others’ brains.”

  “Wouldn’t recommend it,” Spidey remarked from the other side of the room, getting ready to leap. “Mad Octopus Disease is incurable.”

  Venom jumped at him. They rolled and punched again—but Spidey noticed that Venom stayed near the force field. Pseudopodia blurred the air.

  They rolled. Spidey screamed as Venom struck him in the bruised rib. But through the pain he felt the slightest flash of satisfaction. He had seen the one pseudopod that was thinned down to almost literally nothing. On the far side of the force field, he saw the same pseudopod, which had fed through the field, an angstrom thick. Buy it time, he thought. Let it get thick enough to do some good.

  They fought. Venom banged Spidey’s head against the floor. They rolled, but not too far. Punches rained down, bruised the faces under the masks unmercifully. Spidey dragged Venom to his feet again, reared back for one last enormous haymaker, the last blow he felt he would ever have in him.

  A soft sound, like a sigh. Spider-Man looked over Venom’s shoulder and saw the heat haze suddenly go away, and also saw Doc Ock’s face abruptly go blank with sheer surprise.

  There was no need to say anything; they both dived out the door as Ock dived for the control to slap it back on.

  He hit it too late—and pseudopodia whipped out and wrapped around him like ribbons around a much-longed-for present.

  There was a shout from behind Ock as he struggled. People streamed into the area as if they’d been called.

  He had some kind of remote on him, probably, Spidey thought: a panic button. He had little time left to think about it, as the people in black unholstered weapons and started shooting at him.

  He was running on autopilot at the moment. Spidey webbed guns out of hands, bounced across the room, kicked and punched, and generally was a bad target. Most of his attention, though, was on Venom and Ock, struggling and swaying together, tentacles against pseudopodia, the fangs and the dread against the tremendous strength. This is not good, Spidey thought. After I deal with these guys, there’s still going to he Ock. How many times have we fought? And let’s say I do win: then what have I got? Venom—and a very keyed-up Venom, after the last couple of hours.

  He swallowed. When did I last update my will?

  As he was bouncing away from one more felled guy in black, Spider-Man heard an odd, inhaling sound. His spider-sense stung him like a wasp, and he jumped straight up.

  The output from the flamethrower went by right underneath him. Spidey clung briefly to the ceiling, gasping and choking with the rising gasoline fumes, as someone he remembered seeing before, a guy in a floppy black hat with grommets, chased him with the flames. He scuttled along the ceiling.

  “Just a little fire for the bug,” said the man cheerfully. “Not like the fire that’s coming, though. That’ll be worth seeing—and nothing can stop it now.”

  With a tremendous effort, Venom lifted Doc Ock right off the floor and flung him crashing off to one side. Then he turned, murder in his gaze. “Niner,” he said, and stepped toward him.

  Niner turned the flamethrower toward Venom, hitching his shoulders a little to settle the fuel pack comfortably. “Should be quite a sight,” he said, “all the fire, up there where the view and the food’s so superior—but I don’t think you’ll be around to see it. You’re just trouble. Better get rid of you now.”

  “This is Ock’s sidekick?” Spidey said.

  “Niner,” said Venom, circling around toward him. “Amusing to see plain old garden-variety jealousy operating. We had thought the style in sidekicks now was dogged devotion.”


  He leapt. Spidey, off to one side, could see Doc Ock scrambling to his feet again. “Oh dear,” he said softly. “My turn in the barrel.”

  He jumped too—catching, as he did, just a glimpse of Niner as Venom snatched the flamethrower out of his hands, ripped it off at the hose, and then wrapped the pseudopodia around him in what looked like an indissoluble embrace. Niner was no longer a threat.

  He had no more time to spend on that: suddenly there were metal tentacles wrapped around him, and he was dealing with another embrace of his own.

  Ock was almost purple with rage: it was nearly worth choking to death to see. Nearly. Spider-Man struggled to get free, but as always, it was like struggling with angry adamantium pythons. Spider-strength sufficed to get them off him. He bounced out of range for a moment, trying to get his wind, and didn’t get it, as one of those pythons reached up to the ceiling and snatched him down again.

  Not without cost. Ock was still flesh and blood elsewhere, and as he pulled Spidey in at full speed, he also caught, backed by his own strength, Spidey’s fist right in his face. He reeled back. Spider-Man bounced away again. Just for a breath.…

  Then all four tentacles caught him, lifted him high. He shot webbing at them; they broke it, and smashed him to the floor.

  The world went white. No question about the rib this time. No question about maybe three of them. The legs were refusing to work, too. Broken back? No, he wouldn’t still be able to feel the legs then.

  He struggled to at least get halfway up. Ock had turned his back on him, had stalked over to Venom and grabbed him the same way. They were struggling, but the contest couldn’t be in that much doubt, not really. Neither of them was fresh.

  The tentacles held Venom high. Pseudopodia wrapped around them, resisting. There was a moment’s swaying back and forth as dark razory ribbons struck and sliced at Doc’s head, but not with the usual energy, a little feebly.

  “You want to hold on?” Ock said. “Fine.” And then the tentacles simply bashed Venom against the wall. Once—and the wall really did shake this time. Twice. Again. Again, like you would hit a fly you really wanted to flatten. Again.