by Diane Duane
Ron glanced at Lyle, who stood there understandably slack-jawed, and then at the others. All around, weapons were being leveled at the barge, but all the other security people were exchanging the same shocked, horrified looks. Their instructions had been clear enough. Use weapons as they must, but under no circumstances must the cargo be shot at: it was too delicate, or too dangerous, to risk a bullet. People had drawn their own conclusions from those instructions, some of them probably erroneous, but in any case no one wanted to be the first to fire—and certainly not without a clear target.
The barge captain had one, though, if no one else did. As the creature jumped back into the water after pushing the barge away, he was already drawing his gun. By the time the thing had climbed up the side of the barge and was putting its head up over the gunwale, the captain already had the gun leveled and took aim right between the thing’s eyes. As calmly as anyone could have under such circumstances, the captain said, “Hold it right there, mister!”
The scaly creature paid no attention, but went straight for him—and the gun might as well not even have been there. A great inhuman noise, halfway between a roar and a snarl, was the only answer the captain got. He managed to get just one shot off. Where it went, there was no telling: judging by the whine of the ricochet, it missed. Barely a moment later, the creature was on him. Ron had one shocked sight of the captain’s face, frozen in astonishment and horror, as he went down. The second officer came at the thing, but the great green scaled shape backhanded him to one side as if he was a rag doll.
Behind Ron, Lyle was indulging himself in a splendid flow of language which Ron really wished he’d heard while still in grade school, and lifted his gun to sight as the second officer went down.
“In this light?” Ron said softly. Lyle squinted down the length of the barrel, then let it drop, and let out one helpless breath that was more of a curse than anything he’d said out loud. Things were moving too fast: in this light, it would be too easy to hit one of their own by accident, never mind the cargo they weren’t supposed to hit. Closer to the dock, two of the security men slung their guns over their shoulders, kicked their shoes off, and dove, two clean, fast splashes.
Over the quick, short, economical sounds of their strokes, came other sounds. The creature on the barge went thundering and thumping down the stairs from the deck into the barge’s below-decks cargo space. A crash, as a door was burst open: a breath’s space, and then semiautomatic fire—several short bursts. Lyle cursed again at the sound of an immense crash—then a moment’s stillness. The people on the dock looked at each other in horrified surprise.
Then sound again: thrashing, bumping, shouts—“No, what are you—!” “Get away from that!” “No!!” Another crash. Another silence, longer. The men in the water swarmed up over the side of its barge by the access ladders at the bow and amidships.
From belowdecks came one last immense crack of sound, a splintering, breaking noise. The barge swayed, listed to its port, away from the dock. The security men began to unsling their weapons but had no time to do anything more. With dreadful speed, that big, lithe bipedal figure came swarming up out of the barge’s cargo hold again. The first of the security men went at the thing, catching one outflung arm and pulling it back behind the creature, not bent, but straight—the first part of the old elbowbreaking move, usually a surefire crippler and guaranteed to give an assailant so much pain to deal with that there wouldn’t be time or inclination for resistance. This creature, though, simply jerked its arm forward again. All the security man’s strength couldn’t stop it, and the creature flung him forward and right into the bulkhead, to lie beside the captain and second officer.
The second security man launched himself in a splendid front snap kick at the thing’s knee that should have brought the creature crashing down. But the blow had no more effect than if he’d kicked a tree, and the creature merely grabbed him by the scruff in one huge clawed paw or hand, shook him, and threw him overboard.
Abruptly, from behind the creature, a third security guard, whom Ron hadn’t seen, came up over the gunwales behind the creature. He leapt and took it right around the throat with one forearm and pulled back hard. Ron gulped, waiting to hear the crack. But there wasn’t any. The creature bent itself convulsively forward, threw the hapless security guard over its back, and as he hit the deck and rolled, and even then tried to bring his gun to bear, it grabbed the gun from him and bludgeoned the man away with it—then threw the gun overboard after the last man.
The barge was listing further and further to port. The creature paused there, threw a look over its shoulder at the crowd on the dock. A clear shape, briefly isolated, everyone else down: it was the moment. Ron cocked his rifle and fired, then cocked and fired again. All around him, shots winged and whined through the air. There was the occasional shower of sparks, a ricochet from a bulkhead—someone’s marksmanship going very awry: their bosses would have words with them later. That roar went up again. Then the creature leapt into the water. A mighty splash, and it was gone.
A hubbub and brangle of angry voices broke out in the dock area: orders were shouted, and more people jumped into the water, swam out with lines. The barge was reefed in, tied up. The scientists standing around with their “fishing poles” and Geiger counters put them down or dropped them, and hurried over to help.
Ron was one of the first aboard, Lyle close behind him. Others were already trying to help the captain and his second officer. Someone else was on the honker, calling for assistance. Away back on the dock, in the direction of the VAB, the stuttering red lights of the emergency vehicles could be seen approaching.
Ron and Lyle and others moved among the hurt men, helping them up where possible, making them comfortable when it wasn’t. Others got down in the water and helped fish out the man who had been chucked overboard. He had come up for air, spluttering, not much the worse for wear, except for some nips from outraged ducks. The question everyone was asking him, and the captain and the first officer, was simply, “What was that?”
The captain sat against the bulkhead, still rather stunned, but clear enough that he knew what he’d seen. “I thought the dinosaurs were all extinct,” he said. “That thing—it had big jaws, like a Gila monster’s. Mean little eyes. It looked at me before it hit me. Something in it enjoyed what it was doing.” He shook his head, moaned a little as one of the security men tried to straighten out his arm. “No, don’t—it’s busted. Wait for the EMTs.” Ron noticed again the way the boat was leaning in the water. Downstairs, other people were checking the cargo. One of them, a NASA security man named George, came up the stairs, and Ron said to him, “How is it down there?”
George shook his head. “Got a big hole in the side—she’s taking water pretty quick. We need to get her unloaded and then up onto the ramp, before she swamps and sinks.”
“I thought these couldn’t sink,” Ron said.
“They’re not supposed to get holes punched in ’em like that, either,” George said. He gestured with his head down the stairway. “Looks like our boy lost his temper pretty good down there.”
One of the scientists down in the hold stuck his head up into the stairwell. “Milissa, you want to come down here and check me on something?”
A small handsome brunette woman came down the deck and went downstairs to join him. A few minutes of bumping, grunting, and shifting noises ensued. Then Milissa could be heard saying, not loudly, but with great feeling, “Mist!”
Ron looked over at Lyle. “‘Mist’?”
“Computer game of some kind, isn’t it?” Lyle said.
“Not the way she said it.”
Ron went over to where a couple of the other security people were still working with the captain. Milissa and George both came upstairs, then, and they both looked as grim as a month of rainy Sundays. “Harry,” Milissa said to another of the scientists, “you’d better get on the horn to Ops right now. We have a big problem.”
“Why? What? Didn’t—” H
is eyes widened. “Oh, no—”
“The cargo manifest,” Milissa said. “We went through it twice… and we’re short one object down there. Just one.”
“Not—”
“Item fourteen eighteen.”
Harry went ashen, even in this light. “I’ll call the front office,” he said, and jumped off the barge, hit the dock, and kept on running.
The ambulance had pulled up now. Kurt, one of the night-shift EMTs, slipped past and knelt down beside the captain, and seemingly from nowhere, without asking questions, produced an inflatable splint for his arm. The captain, who had been following Milissa and George’s conversation, looked paler than a broken arm alone would suggest—so much so that Kurt stopped to check his pulse a second time, halfway through the splinting. Ron looked at the captain and said, “Fourteen eighteen?”
“If we don’t find it,” the captain said, again too calmly for the circumstances, “we are all in for a very difficult… uh, rest of our lives, I would say.” He sighed. “And here I was two months off retirement…”
“The minor payloads are all in place,” a voice was saying to another figure coming rapidly up the dock. “However—”
“What’s missing?”
“Fourteen eighteen.”
Backlit by the yellow flashing light of the car that had brought him in, a lean tall dark-haired man stepped from the dock onto the deck, and took in everything in one long sweeping glance: the injured men, the pale, sweating scientists, the list of the barge.
“Evening, Dan,” said the barge captain.
Dan looked down at him. The expression was cool, and not one Ron ever wanted turned on him. This man was the Cape’s night Ops supervisor, widely believed to be capable of roasting even four-star USAF generals with a look and a choice word when they got in the way of the smooth running of what he considered his operation. “You look awful, Rick,” he said. “Get your butt over to the hospital right now. Then I want a debrief. You, you, you—” he pointed at Milissa and George and the head of the USAF security team “—I want a debrief in five minutes. Mike—” this to another of the NASA security people “—get onto the CG and have them get a cutter and the Harbor Patrol out. I want divers down, and I want the Banana River exit sealed and netted. Where did whoever that was go?”
“Down… but it didn’t come up, sir.”
“Diving gear?”
“No evidence of any.”
“Doesn’t prove a thing. If they move fast, they may still have time to catch it. Go.”
The security man to whom Dan had been speaking went off in a hurry. Another one whispered, not meaning to be heard, “And what if we can’t find it?”
Dan turned slowly and looked at him—a look that could have been sliced, curled, and dropped into the bottom of a martini. “I hear Outer Mongolia is very nice this time of year,” he said.
As if on cue, several people jumped into the water behind him. Ron hefted his gun. “Boss,” he said to Lieutenant Rice, the senior USAF security officer who had just climbed onto the barge, “I got a clean shot at that thing. I know I hit it. It wasn’t just some guy in a Kevlar bodysuit.”
“No,” the lieutenant said. “That much at least is plain. Not that it’s going to make any difference to our careers.” He sighed. “Come on—let’s help them shift that cargo out of there before this boat goes down. Then—” He flicked a glance back at Pad 39-A.
“Will it go anyway?”
“Oh, it’ll go,” Lieutenant Rice said. “Question is… will we.”
Ron gulped and went below to help move cargo.
ONE
SPIDER-MAN swung across the rooftops of Manhattan. The summer sun shone down on New York City, reflecting off the buildings like rows of skyscraping jewelry. Today, he barely noticed. Web-swinging, which was often a release and a joy for him, one of the things that made being Spider-Man so much fun, held no allure even on this bright, sunny day. Ever since Mary Jane went away, he frankly hadn’t had much taste for anything.
He stopped that train of thought and chucked it out, pretending to drop it to the pavement dozens of yards below. It wasn’t like she was going to be gone forever.
She had turned to him one morning a couple of weeks ago, after the business with Venom and the Hobgoblin had had ten days or so to settle, and she’d said cheerfully, and in the kindest possible way, “Sweetie, I need a rest from your life.”
“Excuse me?” Peter had said.
She’d touched his cheek, then. “I didn’t mean to make it sound that permanent. Look, Tiger… I just need a break. I got a card from Aunt Anna last week. She said, ‘Why don’t you come down and see me next week?’ And, well, why don’t I? I’ve been telling her for the past three years that I would come down to Miami as soon as work permitted. And things have gotten busy…”
“Yeah,” Peter said, “I know, I’ve been meaning to find a way for us to get down there.”
“So, look,” MJ said, “the time for this trip isn’t going to just happen. That doesn’t even happen in normal people’s lives, let alone ours. I think I need to make the time. I think I need to go see her… if only to get her off my case. The tone of that last card was edging just a little bit toward sharp. So I’m going to head on down. I’m not going to hurry. I’ll take the train. I haven’t taken the train for a long time—it’s a lot better now, they say, than it used to be.”
“I don’t know, MJ,” Peter said. “Trains get derailed. They get delayed. And besides, the plane’s cheaper…”
“It’s cheaper because they get rid of you in two hours,” MJ said. “Whereas this takes you overnight.”
“But people get killed on trains—”
“Only in novels,” MJ said firmly. “And only on classy trains. I am sure no one ever got assassinated on an Amtrak train. The atmosphere’d be completely wrong. You,” she said, winding her arms around his neck, “just don’t want me to go anywhere without you.”
“That’s absolutely right,” Peter admitted, shamefaced, and hugged her. “Am I that transparent?”
She smiled at him gently. “You’d make a great window,” she said. “You missed your calling. Except that somebody has to be Spider-Man.”
He chuckled.
“You just don’t want me to leave.”
Several minutes later, when he came up for air, Peter said, “No, I don’t. Ever.”
She looked at him sidewise. “It’s going to get crowded in the bathroom.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes,” she said, “but do you know what I mean? Peter—” She hugged him again. “To let the other person breathe, sometimes you have to let go just a little. I know it’s an act of faith. But do you seriously think that if you let go just a little, I wouldn’t come back?”
“Well, no—but—”
“Then relax.” She smiled at him. “I’ll miss you too. A lot. I just need—” She shrugged. “Call it a vacation in the normal world. Where super heroes and super villains are something you hear about on the news but don’t see much of.”
“You’re sure it’s just two weeks?” Peter said, pulling MJ close again.
She smiled, and hugged him. “For a hero,” she said, “you can be such a weenie sometimes. Anyway, there’s something else that needs doing. I’ve got to see about scaring up some work. There simply doesn’t seem to be any film or TV work for me in this town lately.”
“I noticed,” Peter said. She was being a lot kinder about this statement than she had to be. MJ had had to walk out on her last near-commitment on discovering that New York was apparently about to be blown up, and Spider-Man was apparently going to be stuck in the middle of it. It still astounded Peter, in those dark moments he sometimes experienced in the middle of the night, that MJ had not taken the offer which the producers of that show had made her, and immediately flown out to Los Angeles with them. He wouldn’t have blamed her. In retrospect, on that particular night—with Hobgoblin preparing to nuke Manhattan if he wasn’t paid a stagg
ering ransom—Peter actually would have preferred knowing MJ was on her way to somewhere relatively safe. But she had her own priorities. Since then, though, either because word of her bolting from a successful audition had gotten around, or just from good old-fashioned bad luck, there had been no more TV work for her anywhere.
“Seriously though, hon,” MJ said. “We’ve got enough money to last us a little while, but not that long. Right now I don’t see anything happening at the Bugle that’ll allow you to raise your prices significantly. Do you?”
“Well,” Peter said, “no. There are only about thirty other people jockeying for the same work I’m trying to get. Some of them are better photographers than I am…”
“You have something marketable,” MJ said. “You have a gift for getting good shots of super heroes… and super villains. No one else seems to have quite the knack for it that you have.” Her eyes glinted at him. “But there’s only so far you can make that stretch. Listen—I’ve been taking a look to see where the modeling market has been moving lately. And all of a sudden there’s a lot of action in the Miami area. A lot of modeling agencies, PR agencies, and so forth are beginning to concentrate down there. They like the tropical ambiance: the weather’s dependable, and it’s a good place to shoot. And they like the fact that all those other agencies are gathering down there: everybody’s scratching everybody else’s back, and they can all do a lot of business. I think it might be very smart if I saw about scaring up some modeling work. It won’t be expensive: Aunt Anna will put me up as long as I want to stay.”
Peter nodded. “Just two weeks?”
“Well, it takes time to get known in an area, check out all the possibilities. And what if I find work?”
“Stay there,” Peter said, immediately and with energy. “Work. Make millions of dollars. Be that way. I’ll come down there and be your kept man.”
MJ smiled at him. “And they say chivalry is dead. Now, you know I’d rather stay here with you! But if someone has to go out and bring home the bacon…” She shrugged. “No point in me sitting around here with my feet up waiting for something to happen.”