Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Peter nodded. “When you get back in,” he said, “if you want to call Alicia down in Comp, she’ll take care of the developing—”

  Ben snorted. “I know what she’ll do—she’ll send your film around the corner to the one-hour place! You let me take care of it—I’ll see that they’re properly developed.” He smiled slightly at Peter as a cab pulled up in front of them. “Got a hot date with MJ tonight?”

  “That, and other things,” Peter said. “Thanks, Ben! I appreciate it.”

  “Have a good evening, youngster,” Ben said. He climbed into the cab and was gone.

  Peter watched him go, and then made for the shadows, for somewhere private, where he could change into something more comfortable.

  Before too long, he was web-slinging along through the dark city streets, making his way from building to building and thinking hard.

  Mostly he was turning over a thought which had occurred to him belatedly, after recovering from the craziness last night. He really did have to find out what that radioactive stuff in the warehouses had been. Taken together, those two thefts raised a nasty question: what was Consolidated Chemical Research Corporation doing keeping radioactive material on Manhattan Island, in such insecure circumstances, in two different places? Environmental groups, when they heard, would go ballistic. So would the Environmental Protection Agency, for that matter. Normally, he thought, so would the city. There should be no storage facilities for such stuff within the city boundaries. The material stolen from the train, on the other hand, had been completely aboveboard, destined for the legal storage in one of the deep disused salt mines down south, where nuclear waste was now kept under controlled conditions and federal supervision.

  He was determined to take a closer look at CCRC, from the inside if possible. If a little discreet poking around turned up no evidence of wrongdoing, that was fine. But this whole thing smelled pretty fishy to him.

  He crossed the city carefully. His spider-sense showed no sign of coming back yet, which made him twitchy. He tried, as he went, to keep watch in all directions. If there was any time for Hobgoblin to hit him and take him unawares, this was it. Unless Hobby is off busy somewhere this evening, he thought, playing with his newfound toy.

  He shook his head. If Hobby was holed up building a bomb.… Something else to look into tomorrow at the paper, he thought. Check the database again and see if there have been any other recorded thefts or losses of nuclear material elsewhere in the country. Hobgoblin wouldn’t necessarily have to be there himself to steal the stuff. He’s not above having it stolen for him. And then—He frowned under his mask. He would have to sit down and work out exactly what critical mass was when you were working with uranium isotopes. It was not a piece of math he could do in his head, unfortunately. The physics of military fissionables was something he paid little attention to, on general principles. Some of his classmates spent happy afternoons working out engineering solutions and materials criteria for battlefield nukes. But Peter was not one who found such work enjoyable. I’ll take care of it when I get home, he thought.

  Right now, though, the warehouse building from which the radioactive material had been stolen loomed ahead of him, and next to it, the office building which housed CCRC’s New York City offices. CCRC’s headquarters looked a little seedy, but in good enough repair. The police had the street in front of it and the warehouse cordoned off. Yellow “police line” tape rustled slightly in a slight warm breeze coming off the river, and the cops standing out on the street fanned themselves with their hats. This late, there was little traffic. They looked bored.

  All their attention was toward the street, so it was no particular problem for Spidey to swing up from behind the building, let go of his last webline, land against the upper part of the outside wall, and cling there. He held still for a moment, waiting to see if anything had been dislodged by his impact, waiting to see if the police had noticed. They hadn’t. Faintly he heard a voice come floating up: “So a guy is crossing the street, and he sees this duck—”

  He smiled inside the mask. A bored cop makes a happy Spider-Man, he thought, and wall-crawled down the building, testing window after window as he went. Only the lower ones had protective grilles over them. The upper ones were all locked, except for one. Always some careless person, he thought, who doesn’t think that Spider-Man might visit their building tonight. He pushed the window open—it was an old-fashioned sash window—and swung in through it.

  His feet came down on thick carpeting. He looked around and saw a heavy walnut desk, with matching office furniture all around. Very nice, he thought. That explains the window, too. Some executive who doesn’t want his view spoiled by bars—President’s office? Vice-president’s? Hmm. President’s, or CEO’s, probably; it was a corner office. He looked the place over for signs of alarm systems, saw none. Very lax—especially when you’re involved in this industry.

  Silently, Spider-Man stepped up to the door of the office, touched it. No contact alarms, either. No wiring on the door betraying a “reed switch” which would be broken when the door opened. He turned the knob: the door opened, and he found himself looking into an outer office, a secretary’s office from the looks of it—-nearly two-thirds of the size of the office he had just come from, lined with file cabinets all in walnut, more of that thick carpeting on the floor, a big wall unit with a television, sofas, glass tables—a somewhat executive-level waiting room, it seemed, for people seeing the boss. Now let’s see—

  He went over to the file cabinets. These, at least, were locked, but over time he had become fairly expert at lock-picking. Shortly he had the master lock on the first cabinet open, and was rummaging through the drawers, hunting for anything that seemed interesting.

  Several drawers down, he came across what, to judge from the thickness of it, must be the incorporation info for the company itself. He pulled the file out and riffled through it thoughtfully. CCRC turned out to be fairly young. The names of its members of the board could have been from anywhere in New York, but he was interested to note that the majority shareholder was not an American citizen: he was Ukrainian.

  He worked backwards to the date the company was formed. The Soviet Union would have just fallen—

  After turning up nothing else of great interest, he put the file back where he had found it. But ideas were stirring in his mind, nonetheless. One of the things they’ve been having trouble with in that part of the world, he thought, is radioactive material being smuggled out and sold cheap. What was that one report I heard?—how two guys took a near-critical mass of U-235 out of Russia in the trunks of two cars, and wound up abandoning them on the Autobahn in Germany because they misjudged the distance to Berlin, and ran out of gas? He shook his head. Not everyone dealing in radioactives from behind the former Iron Curtain was that stupid.

  He started going slowly and with care through drawer after drawer. There were a lot of file envelopes with English labels, which, when he opened them, he found contained pages and pages of stuff typed in Cyrillic. He tsked at himself. MJ had been teasing him for some time now about getting so singleminded about the sciences that he was letting the humanities pass him by, the languages especially. Russian was one of the languages she suggested he take—“Because it’s one of the hardest,” she had said, looking at him as if the sense of that reason should be obvious. Now he wondered whether he should have taken her advice. But Cyrillic or not, digits were the same. Some of the files he looked at, as he went through the drawers, were plainly shipping manifests of some kind: lists of figures, amounts in rubles and equivalent amounts in dollars—that much he could make out plainly. A lot of currency transactions, in fact, and a lot of changeovers from rubles to deutschemarks, and here and there a document turned up in what looked like German.

  He was only marginally better at reading German than he was at Russian, but at least here the alphabets were mostly the same. More amounts in deutschemarks appeared, along with references to weights and masses, always in tens or
hundreds of kilograms. And here and there, the German word for “nuclear,” which he had come to recognize during his doctorate work, having seen it often enough in the titles of dissertations and articles in journals. The names of the transuranic elements were also just about the same in German as in English, and he came across repeated references to U-235, U-238, and the German word for “enriched” U-235—

  Each time it was mentioned, somewhere nearby was a column of figures which made it plain that money was changing hands. But nowhere in all those documents did he see anything like a customs stamp or a bill of sale authorized by any government—and governments had to authorize such sales, as far as he knew.

  This place, he thought, is a front, almost certainly, for smuggling the stuff around. The conditions under which they’ve been keeping it downstairs seem to confirm it. Those canisters had the barest minimum of labeling. They were being kept clandestinely—

  He shut the files, tidied up after himself as best he could, and looked thoughtfully at the computer on the secretary’s desk. Not networked: a stand-alone. Might have some interesting files in it. He moved toward the desk.

  From downstairs, in the body of the building, he heard a single, hollow booming sound. A door shutting? He froze, listening hard.

  The sound repeated itself, just once. Boom.

  I think I’m just going to look into that. First of all, though, I want a look at that wall next door.

  He stepped to the outer office door, silently let himself out, looked up and down the hall. Nobody.

  He started looking for a door exiting to a stairwell. At the end of the corridor, he found one, opened it, slipped out, anchored a webline to one of the stair railings, and let himself down, slowly and silently, as far as the well reached: about six stories. When he let go, he found himself looking at a door with a large letter L on it. Loading? he thought, holding still, listening. Somewhere in the building, that soft, low boom sounded again, much closer—

  This level? he thought. Well, let’s have a look.

  Softly he pulled the door open and peered through it. Nothing: a dark first-floor loading area, as he had expected, pillars supporting the ceiling, plain bare concrete floor—and, off to one side, a hole in the wall, with slumped, crumbling-looking edges. Much nearer to him, though, was a big hole in the floor. Its edges had the same look as those of the hole in the wall, and of the picture he’d seen on TV of the warehouse’s wall. That hole would be just across the alley from this one, he thought, glancing up.

  What the heck are they up to in here?

  That booming noise came again. Might be the police, he thought. Might be a good time to excuse myself. But that hole in the floor, the size of it, the look of it, drew him.

  He stepped carefully to its edge and looked down. It gave directly into a big brick-lined sewer tunnel which ran beneath this building. A faint smell of sewage floated up out of it. Radiation, he thought, could definitely cause a hole like this—if it was tremendously intense, tremendously confined—causing the material to come apart out of sheer fatigue. A good push would break it after such treatment.

  Boom.

  It is the police, I bet. Well, I’m going to get out of here. He went hurriedly to the hole in the wall, looked hastily up and down the alley. The yellow police tapes fluttered a bit down at the far end. Being inside them, he had no one impeding him. The coast was clear, so he slipped hurriedly across the alley, through the hole in the far wall, and into the warehouse where the homeless man had died.

  The place stank of blood. It was drying, but not fast enough in this humidity, and the place had a dark, desolate feel, very much like the lower level of the next building over. There was nothing to see here.

  Boom.

  Not in the other building: in this one. Possibly a door opening and shutting in the wind? He turned—and saw the dark shape loom out of the shadows, almost directly behind him. There would have been no warning from his spider-sense even if it had been working at the moment. The dark shape, tall, broad-shouldered, fangs like a shark’s dream of heaven, splitting in a grin of unholy glee, and the white stylized spider-shape splashed across the chest.

  Spider-Man launched himself at Venom and was astounded a second later when Venom merely backhanded him away. The backhand by itself was more than powerful enough to slam Spider-Man into the wall near the big hole, and leave him reeling for a moment.

  “We might have thought,” said the low, menacing voice, angry but also oddly amused, “that you at least might have learned never to judge by appearances.”

  Spider-Man leapt again, and this time Venom’s dreadful fangs parted in a smile that went so far around the back of his head, the top should have fallen off. Two-handed, he clubbed Spider-Man sideways again, and this time he stepped back. Spidey flew ten feet or so through the air, came down hard on the concrete floor, but rolled and sprang up again. There he crouched, taking a breath to get his composure back.

  “I don’t care about the smooth talk, Eddie,” Spider-Man said, looking for the best place to attack. “Whatever else may be going on, you’re a fugitive—”

  “Whatever else,” Venom said softly. “Then you have some odd suspicions, too.”

  “Suspicions? About what?”

  “That we would never be involved in such as what happened—here.” Some of the awful grin faded as Venom looked around him with distaste. “Someone,” he said, “did murder here, in our name.” He looked sideways at Spider-Man. “And we are not amused.”

  “Now why should I believe you?” Spidey said.

  Venom simply looked at him, folding his arms. “Because you know us?”

  Spider-Man breathed in, breathed out. “You’ve got me there,” he said.

  “So,” said Venom, “you will forgive us for the moment if we choose not to permit your infantile attempts to apprehend us.” He chuckled nastily, and the symbiote for its part took the opportunity to wave that horrendous slime-laden tongue at Spider-Man, wuggawuggawugga, in straightforward mockery. “Later on we’ll have leisure to joint you and nibble the bones. But right now, we have other matters to attend to.”

  “Is ‘we’ you or is ‘we’ us?”

  Venom paused a moment, then chuckled again. “A college education just isn’t what it used to be, is it? ‘We’ is us—I think. At least, any information you can share with us will be welcome. Someone here,” Venom said, looking darkly around at the spattered walls, “someone here is trying to frame us for the deaths of these innocents—and when I catch them, both for the attempted framing, and for the murders, we shall certainly eat their spleen.”

  Spider-Man sighed in brief annoyance. “Listen,” he said, “hearts, livers, even lungs I could see. But spleens? Have you ever even seen a spleen? I bet you don’t even know where it is.”

  “We could find out,” Venom said, looking at him speculatively, and that grin went right around his head again. “It would be fun.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t want to do that right now.”

  “Don’t tempt us. Part of us still desires to make peace with you in the most final manner. But that’s going to have to wait. We have done some preliminary research on the firm which owns this property and the one next door. Its clandestine associations make us very uneasy.”

  “The smuggling, you mean,” Spidey said.

  “You deduced that? Very good.”

  “Nothing as fancy as deduction,” Spider-Man said. “I just went through their files. Their paperwork is lousy with deutschemark and ruble transfers.”

  “Yes,” Venom said. “That would seem to argue a busy trade across the former East German border. Possibly also the hiring of old East German scientific talent for some purpose. There is a lot of that going very cheap now, I hear. Russian as well.”

  “And Ukrainian,” Spider-Man said.

  Venom nodded. “The owners.” He glowered back at the hole in the wall. “A sordid business, but one with which we would not normally concern ourselves. In our normal haunts, we
have other concerns these days.”

  “You mean that cave under San Francisco?” Spidey said.

  Venom eyed him. “It is an underworld,” he said, “though not the kind that’s usually meant by the term. People who’ve taken refuge in a part of the city buried and abandoned in the earthquake eighty years ago. We protect them.” For a moment there was just a tinge of pride in the voice.

  “It’s always nice to have a purpose,” Spider-Man said, “besides eating people’s spleens.”

  Venom sighed. “You are an insolent puppy,” he said. “But you’re right about the purpose. There is worthwhile work to be done, down where the innocents have taken refuge from a world too cruel for them. Noble work, building them a better world than the one they’ve fled.”

  “I won’t argue that,” Spider-Man said.

  “You’ll understand, then,” Venom said, gazing around him coldly at the spattered walls, “that all this—” he gestured around with several tendrils “—will sully our image. Whoever is masquerading as us will be unmasked, swiftly, and will pay terribly for the crime.”

  “Look,” Spider-Man said, inching closer, “I understand that this makes a sort of image problem for you. But a lot of other people have had problems with you and that suit. A lot of them haven’t survived them. So you’ll understand if I have to cut short the chat, and at least try to take you in—”

  That was when they heard the voice from outside. “Charley? Charley, is that you down there, or Rod?”

  “Nope, Rod’s down here,” came another voice.

  “Then who’s in the building?”

  Spider-Man and Venom looked at each other, shocked. It was the police this time.

  “You’ll forgive us,” Venom said, “if we don’t wait around for whatever it is you’re planning to try now. If you cross our path again, Spider-Man—don’t cross us. We’re on business.” And he leaped out the hole in the wall and upward into the darkness.