by Diane Duane
“This is Venom,” said a voice which Peter recognized all too well, while the news show displayed a file picture of him, with a banner over it saying “POLICE RECORDING—5:30 A.M.” “We have just been involved with the capture of the criminal called Hobgoblin, who will shortly be delivered to the authorities, and the dismantling of the nuclear device with which he threatened the people of New York City. We have also participated in the destruction of the creature which has for a short time caused the people of this city to believe that we, Venom, were murdering its innocents.” There was a pause, and then the voice became, to Peter’s informed ear, tinged with just a bit of grim amusement. “Spider-Man, an equal participant in these matters, will be able to confirm to the authorities that it was this creature, and not ourself, Venom, who was responsible for the murders in question. In return for this service, and other favors recently rendered, we find it appropriate for the moment to leave New York to pursue other matters which require our immediate attention—of which, for the moment, Spider-Man is not one.”
Peter sat there, looking slightly stunned. Then he yelled at the television, “Well, don’t say ‘thank you’ or anything!”
MJ looked at him, and very, very softly, began to laugh. After a few seconds, Peter joined her.
“So,” he said, “how did that audition go, anyhow?”
“Actually, they offered me the role—”
“That’s great!”
“—but I turned it down.”
Peter blinked. “What? Why?”
“Because, thanks to Hobgoblin, they were urgent to fly out to LA—immediately. I couldn’t just leave when I wasn’t even sure if you were okay or not.”
Peter stared at her. She had been going on for ages about how she wanted nothing more than to work. Obviously, there was at least one thing she wanted more. He pulled her into a hug. “What did I do to deserve you?”
“You were just yourself,” she whispered. She kissed him on the cheek, then broke the embrace. “Now tell me what’s in the bag.”
“Bag? Oh.” He opened it, handed her the bottle. “Is the city having a run on Woolite, or something? I had to try three places.”
She grinned. “You remembered! And you need it, tiger, you and that costume both. Get it off.”
Peter unpacked the camera and the last few spider-tracers, and the change from the Woolite, all of which he left on the table. “Which of us you going to scrub first?” he said, heading down the hall after MJ.
Her nightgown hit him in the face as he came up even with the bathroom door. “Come find out,” MJ said, playfully splashing hot water at him as she climbed into the tub.
Peter smiled and went after her.
THE VENOM FACTOR
Book Two
THE LIZARD SANCTION
Diane Duane
For Joe Motes, Ruthanne Devlin, and the many other nice people associated with SeaTrek ’89:
with thanks for a happy trip to Miami and southward, not forgotten yet—not by a long shot…
PROLOGUE
“NOW, just take a look at that,” said a voice out of the predawn darkness. “Did you ever see a bug that big in your life?”
It was a fair question. Southern Florida was famous for a lot of things, but one that didn’t get as much attention as the tourist attractions and the balmy climate was the insect life. There in the near-darkness, Airman Ron Moore stood gazing down at his feet and shook his head. He shifted the machine gun he was carrying from the crook of one arm to the other, eyeing the glossy brown-black palmetto bug that wandered past his shoes, waving its antennae in apparent nonchalance as it went about its business. It must have been at least four inches long from its head to the ends of its wing-cases.
“I don’t know,” Ron said as his friend Lyle came up from behind him. “I would have thought something this big would violate the square-cube law, huh, Lyle?”
“From the size of it,” Lyle said, “I bet it could violate any law it liked, as far as bug laws go.”
“No, I mean the law about how big critters can get without having backbones.”
“Oh.” Lyle breathed out, a small laughing sound in the night as the palmetto bug wandered off. “I’d say this one ought to get at least a ticket, then. A moving violation—walking while invertebrated.” He peered at it as it trundled past him. “Or exceeding the federally mandated number of legs. Would that be a misdemeanor or a felony?”
“Bug misdemeanors,” Ron said, sighing. “You need a reality transplant, you know that, Lyle?” He turned to look behind them at the one source of light besides the setting moon, a few days short of being full. The moonlight glistened rough on the marshland all around them and the water close by, but the next best source of illumination was Launch Complex 39, a mile and a half east of them.
It was not lit up like a Christmas tree, as it would be in eleven days’ time when STS-83 went up. With the budget as tight as it was these days, there was no point in leaving the lights on all night. Anyway, it upset the migrating birds, not to mention the local bats. With the Shuttle still just behind them in the Vehicle Assembly Building, pad 39-A itself was quiet, though not quite all in the dark: two of the forty big Xenon spots were on, trained down low on the Fixed Service Structure near ground level, and giving light to the people running final inspections on the huge north-side LOX tanks before they were filled in the next couple of days. That was not a job that Ron would have wanted, himself. Being that close to high explosives made him twitch.
Not that tonight’s job was exactly the equivalent of being rocked to sleep, either. He glanced over at Lyle, who had turned away from his examination of the palmetto bug and was giving other matters his attention again.
“No sign of it yet,” he said, shifting his gun again.
“Nope,” Ron said. “I thought we would have seen it by now.”
Lyle shook his head, scuffed his boots on the concrete a little, and whistled a few notes’ brief imitation of the little peeper-frogs whose tiny voices filled the night. Ron had wondered whether Lyle knew something more about this cargo than he was letting on. That wouldn’t have been out of the ordinary. Ron was Air Force; Lyle was NASA Security, and though in the strictly military pecking order he didn’t count, Lyle could sometimes be counted on to know things that the military side wasn’t told.
“Transport came in at two,” Ron said. “Or so I was told.”
Lyle nodded. Canaveral Air Force Base saw a fair amount of freight traffic, but little cargo came in so late unless it was somehow sensitive. Night flights attracted notice just by their relative scarcity. This one had come in with a jet escort: a pair of Phantoms, with all the hard points occupied and the safeties off the fighters’ guns. The big C-130 transport had touched down on 12 Left, its escort sweeping by on either side as it decelerated, and then both jets had circled overhead, keeping watch until the Here got onto the taxiway and down to the apron, where the security detachment in their jeeps and trucks were waiting for it.
“Not late,” Lyle said, “I don’t think. They just wanted to make sure that everything was in order before they started moving things around.”
“Things,” Ron said softly. Lyle laughed again, and looked down the canal.
The big concrete apron on which they stood was somewhat better lit than 39-A, though, again, not overly bright, for the sake of the birds and bats, and so as not to attract attention in other ways. Right behind them, the VAB towered up, the flag and Bicentennial star on its upper reaches showing in pale and dark grays in the moonlight, its lower walls much brighter in the mercury lights shining down on the parking and haulage aprons. The apron on which Ron and Lyle stood was part of the main haulage and access area, right between the pool at the end of the barge canal and the VAB proper, and just in front of its east door. Ron and Lyle were only two of about forty USAF and NASA security people scattered around to secure the VAB perimeter, and the barge docking and loading area on the west side of the canal’s terminal pool. There were other p
eople there too, not uniformed—mission supervisors and scientists, mostly from Johnson, consulting various kinds of instruments, or else just standing, waiting, empty-handed, gazing out toward the water, down to where the other end of the canal met the Banana River.
Ron looked out too. Lyle said, “See that? On the left.”
Very faint, far out on the dark water of the river that splits the Cape in two the long way, a little light moved like a red star. Shortly thereafter, a green one showed to its left. A breath or so later, a loud annoyed sound came floating up from the eastern end of the canal, like an aging comedienne going “Haaah, haaah, haaah” at someone’s bad joke.
“Ducks,” Lyle said. “There’s a bunch of them nesting down there.”
Ron raised his eyebrows. The wildlife around here had never paid much attention to the act of Congress that turned this scrubby, marshy coastline into Cape Canaveral. NASA, seeing no reason to be a bad neighbor, especially to endangered species, let them be most of the time—though at launch times most of the birds were encouraged by Air Force falconers to clear out for a day or so. They always came back without much fuss, though, and complained at passing traffic in the air and on the water as if they thought they owned it.
Now the barge coasted silently past the nesting sites in the reeds at the canal’s far end, and the ducks got quiet again.
“There were a lot of guys sent out to do far-perimeter work earlier,” Ron said. “Out by the public road.”
Lyle nodded. “I heard about that. Guess the trouble they were expecting didn’t materialize.”
“Just as well,” said Ron. “I guess the hour helped.”
Lyle laughed softly. “More likely telling people that the thing wasn’t coming in until next week helped, too.”
They walked a few steps together, keeping one eye on the canal as they examined the flat bare area of concrete they had been told to police. Past them went a couple of NASA specialists, one in a lab coat with a radiometer, one in a T-shirt that said “The Dream is Alive,” both wearing the proper new ID badges: Ron and Lyle nodded to them as they went.
“Interesting,” Lyle said, “the way they changed the badges all of a sudden last week.”
Ron nodded. Such things happened often enough, but rarely without a few weeks’ warning, bureaucracy being what it was. This change, though—new badge format, new photos, holographic fingerprints embossed into the badges, new scanners with which to read both them and the wearer’s hand—had been imposed on both sides, USAF and NASA, with no warning at all. “You get the feeling,” Ron said, “that someone Upstairs was worried about—?” He wouldn’t name any names, just pointed with his chin at the barge lights coming toward them from down the canal.
Lyle scuffed again, paused, looked up: they both turned and slowly started to pace back the way they had come. “Hard to tell,” he said. “You hear a lot of scuttlebutt, you don’t know what to make of half of it. Most of it’s bull. All the same…” Lyle frowned. He was a big, heavy-featured man; in the dim reflected light from the VAB, his eyebrows and his cheekbones had more shadows than they usually did, making him look slightly sinister. “You’ve heard the news lately. I don’t think it’s the public protest that’s bothering the higher-ups, so much—the people who’ve been marching out there aren’t violent—”
“With this much explosive stuff around,” Ron muttered, glancing back toward 39-A, “I wouldn’t want to get violent, either.”
“Well, no. But I think there may be more to it. We’ve been seeing a lot of the Coast Guard people lately—”
“So have we,” Ron said. It was something he had been wondering about. “Normally they’re busy further south.”
Lyle nodded. “Something’s up. Nothing really major, to judge by the signs, but all the same, cutters are popping up like mushrooms after a rainstorm, and people are acting pretty nervous. Were you told particularly not to listen to any excuses from people not wearing the proper ID?”
“Just run ’em in, the Boss told me,” Ron said. They came down to the barge-landing dock again, and stood there, with several other USAF and NASA security people, now, watching the barge drift slowly down the canal toward them. Ron could hear the faintest putt-putt-putt noise emitting from it.
“And if trouble started, shoot first, ask questions later?”
Ron looked at Lyle just a little sidelong. These were not matters one normally discussed “in the clear.” Their different services usually had slightly different approaches to such problems. But Ron nodded slowly. “Unusual,” he said, very softly. “Normally they would want to wring someone out pretty conclusively, rather than…”
There was a small silence. “It suggests,” Lyle said in as low a voice, “that the people who might be, shall we say, breaching security wouldn’t be expected to know anything worth wringing out of them. Or, if they did, then whatever they’re up to is likely to be so dangerous, the Folks Upstairs would rather they were shot out of hand—even at the cost of intelligence about what they were after.”
Ron nodded. “Not nice,” he said. “But you’re right.There’s an atmosphere as if people think someone is taking an unhealthy interest in things down here. Unusual.” He shivered a little, an odd response on a warm night.
The putt-putt-putt was loud now, threatening to drown out, however briefly, the noise of the peepers. The barge was almost out of the canal and into the docking pool, its ghostly reflection preceding it in the water. Another brief ruffle of duck squawks, then quiet again as it passed the reed beds at the near end where the canal and the pool met.
The barge was one of the typical long, low ones that usually carried the Shuttle’s pairs of reusable solid-fuel boosters to the VAB for mating. The boosters were flown into Canaveral Air Force Base from the contractor in Utah, then boated over and up, this being considered safer than subjecting them to the shocks of even brief overland travel. One side of the pool was flattened to take the barge side-on, and the dock there was reinforced to take the heavy unloading cranes necessary to lift the boosters off and truck them into the VAB.
The usual long cargo was missing from the barge’s upper deck this time, but the barge still rode very low in the water. There were a couple of men on deck—one in a NASA windbreaker, another in USAF uniform. Dim red lights showed in the ship’s cabin, and very dim white ones from the belowdecks hatchway.
There was no rush forward to warp the barge in. The guys with the instruments stepped forward and moved toward the barge as cautiously as if they expected it to blow up at any moment. Ron cocked an eye at Lyle. “I thought they said that this cargo was fairly routine.”
Lyle looked at him. “Compared to what? I think these things can get awfully relative. And it strikes me that Upstairs has no problem giving us a little disinformation. They’ve done it before.”
They watched the science team holding out their various instruments: things that might have been Geiger counters, one that looked more like a prop from a science fiction movie than anything else, and another one that looked like a fly-fishing pole. Lyle chuckled a little under his breath. “What’re they gonna do,” he muttered, “check it for trout?”
Ron smiled slightly. “Well, at least we’ve got past the bug jokes. Think we’ll make it any further up the evolutionary ladder before our coffee break?”
One of the scientists looked up then. “Hey, Maddy,” he said, “come take a look at this, would you?” Another of the team, one of the windbreaker-wearers, came over and put his head over the railings, looked in slight alarm at the barge.
There was a splash. All around the dock, heads snapped toward the water. Ron lifted his gun a bit higher.
On the barge, a figure came out of the wheelhouse, looked around. From behind the boat came the much louder and closer “Haaah, haaah, haaah” of another duck. The officer on the barge—its captain, Ron judged from the stripes on his windbreaker’s sleeves—looked over at the ripples spreading in the water, then over at the people on the dock, and said, “One
of you guys drop something?”
People on the dock muttered, peered, denied anything to do with the splash. The duck went on with its noisy protests for perhaps a minute or so; the barge’s second officer came out of the wheelhouse as well, and the two of them looked around the boat, seeing nothing which might have caused the noise. The two scientists who had been conferring now looked over at the barge’s officers.
“You about ready?” said the captain.
“In a moment, Cap’n,” said the man with the “fishing pole.” “Not quite sure why you should be spilling so much beta.”
The duck started quacking again, a louder and more insistent noise. People on the dock laughed. “Sounds like you forgot to pay toll on the way up,” one of them said.
The suggestion was greeted with chuckles from the barge crew. “Heaven forbid anybody on this run should be denied their proper overtime,” the captain said. “Mike’s got a sandwich—we’ll take care of them on the way out.”
More splashing ensued—and then a single much larger splash. The captain turned, looking out toward the pool.
The problem was not there. Something vaguely human-shaped, but much bigger, with an odd, slick sheen to its skin, was clambering up out of the water onto the dock. Ron, gazing at this, first thought that someone from the barge or the dock had fallen in—but that wasn’t the case. Anyway, no one on the security team looked like that. No uniform—was that some kind of diving suit? It looked almost scaled. But since when did diving suits have tails?
That tail whipped fiercely from side to side as the creature clambered up onto the dock, glared around it. It braced itself then with its forelimbs, and with its hind legs and tail gave the barge a great push and sent it almost staggering back into the water, away from the dock. The barge wallowed and rocked, and big backwash ripples came rushing and splashing up onto the dock. The creature leapt off the dock then, splashed down into the water, and in two strokes and a leap, was clambering up onto the side of the barge.