Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “Here,” Murray said, holding it up for him to see.

  “Infrared night glasses?” Spider-Man said curiously. “Or a starlight ’scope?”

  Murray shook his head. “Better than both. This is a thermal imager.”

  Inside the mask, Spider-Man raised his eyebrows. The gadget was military—or in this case, more probably SWAT—technology, something that made it possible to see people and vehicles by their own heat emissions without using an active infrared source to illuminate them. It would work in fog or smoke as well as darkness, and, unlike standard low-light optics, needed no light at all.

  “If you’re going to be out in the ’Glades again,” said Murray, “and especially at night, this should do you some good. Most animals run hotter than people, and most of our local reptiles run cooler. At night they’ll be cooler still. A little practice and you’ll be able to tell one from the other easily enough. This—” he tapped a small knurled wheel at the side of the big lens-cover “—is an adjustable thermograph. Right now it’s set between 95 and 100 degrees; that should catch most people.”

  “As low as 95? I thought everyone was 98.6?”

  Murray laughed. “That reading’s based on an average taken from a hundred people nearly a hundred years ago. Not what I’d call a very representative sample. So the default setting is 95 to 100. Once you’ve found out the temperature of the person you’re trying to find, you can fine-tune the viewer to find that signal in your field of vision, tag the target with a color or an ID letter, even—” he turned the viewer over and pointed to a row of tiny buttons “—keep track of up to six different traces at any one time.”

  “Murray,” Spider-Man said, “where did you steal this from?”

  “Steal?” Murray said, drawing himself up and looking offended. “Hardly. The word you’re looking for is requisition.”

  “With extreme prejudice?”

  Murray laughed. “Not that extreme. The DEA guys use these for surveillance, and they’ve left us a couple. But I signed this out in my name, so for God’s sake don’t lose it, and whatever you do, don’t break it!”

  “Is that worse than losing it?”

  “Probably. Losing it I could explain as someone else requisitioning it from me. With extreme prejudice. Breaking it, though, and I’d have to explain how it got broken.”

  “That settles it,” Spider-Man said. “If worse comes to worst, I’ll lose it.”

  “Please don’t!”

  “Only kidding. I’ll bring it back to you safe and sound. With, I hope, some answers.”

  Now, he was swinging along through the cypresses, doing his best to retrace his way to the spot where he and Venom had clashed. Once he found that, he could also find the bearing on which the Lizard had taken off, and follow that. And then… That was always the question. And then what?

  What will you do when you catch him’? Spidey asked himself as he swung. Hit him over the head, tie him up, and take him home to Martha and William? It’s not likely to be that simple. You’d better hope the police are nowhere near when you find him, because they’ll just hit him over the head, tie him up—and then toss him in jail.

  There are worse possibilities, he mused. What if he’s actually getting close to finding a cure? What if, wherever he’s hiding out here, he’s close to the solution? Whatever else has been going on with him—and again Peter thought of the old lady’s strange description of the Lizard stopping and starting, like a machine, like something being run by remote control—he has a right to go about his own business. But what if it’s not his business? What if he is being used as a tool to commit crimes? That’s gotta be stopped. And not just for other people’s sakes; for his too.

  It was all so tangled, and the thought of the hydrogel was on his mind, too. Was the hydrogel somehow wrapped up in the issue of Curt’s cure? That wasn’t an idea Peter particularly liked. It suggested that Curt had acquired at least enough control over the Lizard that he was stealing for a purpose.

  “No,” he said aloud. “I don’t believe it.” Then he slowed down and looked about him in the darkness. This was the place. He dropped down onto one of the small islets where he, the Lizard, and Venom had fought, recognizing the torn and trampled reeds and the place where one of the alligators had fallen. There was no sign of that ’gator now. Whatever else you could say about the scavengers in the Everglades, they were both efficient and thorough.

  He pulled out Murray’s present, which had been webbed to his back, carefully put it on and lowered the visor. At first it was a little difficult to get used to focusing both through the eyepieces of his costume and the lenses of the viewer, but he managed at last, and drew in a sharp breath.

  These weren’t like the stark, pallid infrared pictures of a TV wildlife show, or even the ghostly green visuals transmitted through starlight scopes during Desert Storm. Instead they were color images that showed up as clearly as on a cloudy day, or maybe even a bit brighter. Trees and undergrowth all had their colors; not exactly those of nature, but the mini-computer built into the headset recognized each separate heat wavelength in its programmed temperature band and assigned each source its own specific color. Cool was dark, warm was light, but only the water and the sky were dead black.

  Slowly Spidey turned his head, getting his bearings—and also getting used to the slightly skewed perspective of a landscape illuminated by heat instead of light. It would not be comfortable to use this visor for long, especially on the move, but if he was lucky he wouldn’t need to use it for very long.

  He took off along the line where he had last seen the Lizard swimming, heading more or less due east. A moment later, as he swung slowly along, webbing his way from tree to tree with more care and less speed than usual, he saw that under the image a faint line of data was giving an inertial tracking readout that even included latitude and longitude. The visor had its own satellite tracker built in, and displayed the exact location of whatever object was centered in its field of view.

  Very handy, Spidey thought, becoming more determined than ever not to drop or break this thing. If he had thought the Questar was expensive, the thermal viewer was an order of magnitude more so. He paused under one cypress to fiddle with the temperature setting on the right temple of the headset, and as he clicked it up and down, various parts of the landscape—a tree here, a reed-bed there—flared brighter or dimmed down.

  That was all very well, but to make best use of the visor, the one piece of information that he needed was the one he didn’t have. What was the Lizard’s body temperature? The question probably came in two parts. Was Curt’s metabolic rate as the Lizard closer to the human or to the reptilian end of the scale? And was that the modern, cold-blooded reptilian metabolism, with its reliance on ambient temperature, or was it that of a small, warm-blooded dinosaur?

  Spidey shook his head and adjusted the readout to “see red” at 95 degrees. Without any hard information, splitting the difference might just work. He went off on the Lizard’s trail again, holding to that due-east course and watching the water, studded with reedy islets, as he went.

  Of course, there was no hope at this late stage that he would find any trace of the Lizard’s passage actually left in the water. The day’s heat, the night’s cold, the currents stirred up by passing alligators, and the slow percolation of water through the aquifer would all have long obliterated his trail so far as temperature was concerned. But if he just kept his eyes open, there was a chance of spotting the less high-tech traces of broken branches or trampled undergrowth.

  He headed steadily eastward, and after about twenty minutes of swinging, he paused and looked around him. Nothing but a soft, hazy glow near the horizon, like sunrise. It was a little late in the night for that—or a little early—but he kept going east, and as the minutes passed, that glow on the horizon grew. Through the visor it was an astonishing light, rapidly becoming blinding. Spider-Man swung on toward it, sweeping the visor from side to side. He went on that way for a long time, seeing no sign
of anything in the temperature range he had set.

  The visible-light end of the spectrum showed him an alligator sluggishly pulling itself up and out of the water before flopping its scaly bulk down onto a reedbed. Here and there an owl or a night-hunting kite went by in a brief, brilliant blob of light that left a trailing afterimage across his vision. And the glow in the east got brighter and brighter, until it was like looking at the dawn.

  Shortly Spider-Man stopped. He was running out of trees, at least for the moment. Farther east he could see several small clumps of them gathered together. These, he had found out from one of the tourist books, were the “hammocks” that Hammock Park had been named for: knots of trees growing so closely together that they formed a living palisade, with a little isolated biosphere inside each one. He sprang toward the area where the hammocks began, passed the first one, and kept going. The first limb of the moon came up over the flat edge of the world, looking molten-white through the visor.

  Spider-Man paused on one island of trees to turn the gain down, readjusting for temperature as he did so. As he jiggled the click-stopped wheel it went too high for a moment, right up over the hundred mark. The rest of the cool, nighttime world went briefly black, but far off to his right a heat source glowed, then faded as he adjusted the control again.

  What the…?

  Spidey held still for a moment, staring toward the visual memory of that spark of light, and delicately racked the visor’s setting back up again. The spark grew again, then stabilized, radiating at 106 degrees. At this time of night? he thought, for it was well past midnight.

  He made for the pinpoint of light, and as he closed to within five hundred yards, he could see it for what it was: a hammock, but a huge one. Spidey noted the latitude and longitude on the tracker display, and memorized it. This, he thought, is distinctly fishy—or reptile-y. Whatever.

  About a hundred yards away, he paused, lifted the visor—blinking under the mask as he did so—then removed the entire headset and rewebbed it to his back. While other hammocks that he could see had a somewhat higher ambient heat than their surroundings, even at this time of night, none of them had been this hot. There was something in there worth looking at.

  Let’s just take a little peek, he thought, and moved in. As he got closer, the islets gave way to larger patches of firm ground, at least on this side. Little rivulets made their way through, but one strip of water was a canal, cut through a stand of reeds, fairly deep from the looks of it, and leading toward the hammock. Very interesting, he thought, and leapt across it.

  Something hit him chest-high, and knocked him backwards into the water with a splash. Something else hit him again, adhered, grabbed him, and pulled him with brutal speed and strength out of the water and onto firmer ground. He struggled against what held him, but his arms wouldn’t work. Spidey strained again, and this time felt strands part.

  It was webbing. Very familiar organic webbing which, along with the lack of a spider-sense warning, clued him in as to his attacker’s identity in short order.

  Alien tentacles whipped around him but didn’t manage this time to pinion his arms. Two can play at that game, he thought, grabbed a bunch of the pseudopodia, and pulled hard. What might have started as a leap ended as a crash as Venom came cannoning into him and they went down together, half in and half out of the water and the reeds.

  “Same old places, same old faces,” said Spider-Man as he struggled to his feet, threw off the rest of the web, and bounded twenty or thirty feet to one side. “Here I thought I was on vacation by myself, and it turns out I’m on a package tour with you! Don’t you have any initiative? Is following me around the only thing you can do?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Spider-Man!” Venom hissed. His awful prehensile tongue came out and stroked along the fangs in his open, grinning jaws. “We’re ready enough to stop for lunch, if you insist.” Tendrils shot out at Spider-Man, but he wasn’t there anymore. From something like ten feet in the air over Venom’s head he shot webbing, two-handed, straight down, fast and hard. It tangled about Venom’s head and shoulders, and plastered the first wave of pseudopodia to his body before they could extend far enough to be a threat to Spidey.

  Down he came on the other side, rolled and bounced as Venom struggled in the webbing. It was only a matter of seconds, Spider-Man knew, before he would break free. As regarded webbing, they were fairly evenly matched.

  “I don’t have time for this, Venom,” he said, bouncing again as the first strands of web shredded and more pseudopodia came streaming out at him. “It’s not you I’m after!”

  “Oh, no doubt. Just where is your confederate the Lizard?” Venom burst free of the last length of web and went for Spidey in a rush. “We’ll have that information at least, before we rip your useless head off!”

  “Haven’t got a clue, fang-face,” Spider-Man said, avoiding Venom’s rush. “Right now I’m a lot more interested in what’s cooking in the kitchen over there.” He pointed at the hammock. Venom came down in a crouch about a dozen feet distant, and simply stared at him for a moment, breathing hard.

  “Indeed?” said Venom, and his voice filled with menace. “Then why—”

  Crack! The first shot went between them. Spider-Man, warned by his spider-sense, had gone down flat before the gun went off, and Venom followed suit immediately thereafter. It was a good thing they did, for a second later the unseen gunman switched his weapon to full automatic and the air above their heads was filled with the whine and crackle of high-velocity rounds.

  To Spider-Man, it sounded rather like the bank robbery the other morning—except that instead of being safely above it, he was slap in the middle, in the dark, in an unfamiliar place, with Venom not ten feet away. There was more firing, a lot of it and from more than one gun, then the roar of engines starting up. Spidey could hear the droning propeller-fans of flatboats like the one he had encountered the night before, and another, deeper bellow like a big outboard motor. The engines revved up, then came blaring toward them.

  “While they’re moving!” Spidey said. “We may not get another chance! That reed island over there. You lead a bunch of them away from it, that way. I’ll go the other. We’ll meet up there—” The rest of what he might have said was drowned by the hammer of more gunfire, short, controlled bursts from several automatic weapons, so that the neighborhood began to sound like a busy night in Sarajevo.

  “Even you,” Venom growled, “have a good idea occasionally.” He took off northward. Spider-Man headed south, jumping, rolling, and occasionally crawling through reedbeds and stands of brush, slowly working his way back around to the island he had indicated to Venom. Two of his pursuers were fan-boats, and one of them was a kind of amphibious craft.

  He jumped to the other side of the canal, ran farther southward, then doubled back on his tracks while out of sight and ducked deep into a thick raft of cattails. The two fan-boats droned past, closely followed by the amphibian. Each of the fan-boats was carrying about six men; from a quick glance through the cattails, Spidey could see that they were dressed in dark camouflage coveralls with their faces blackened. Every one of them was carrying an assault rifle, and it was obvious from the way they were spraying out fire that they weren’t paying for their own ammunition.

  When they were safely past and the ripples were splashing up against the cattail raft where he was hiding, Spidey hurriedly made his way—very low, very cautious—back to the reedbed he had shown Venom. He slipped into it and lay flat for a moment, just getting his breath back, then put his head up. A pseudopod snaked silently out of the darkness and pushed it back down again, as another of the boats came back.

  The roar of its engine died down to a throaty rumble and then fell silent as it lay rocking in the water no more than twenty feet away. “Where’d they go?” somebody said.

  There was a short crackle of static from a walkie-talkie, followed by another voice grumbling, “One went north an’ the other went south like cats with scalded tails.”<
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  “Question is,” said the first voice, “who were they?”

  “Doesn’t matter. Pretty sure they’re gone now.”

  There was another burst of static, and then a third voice spoke from another walkie-talkie. “We gotta timetable here. We can’t linger.”

  More static, and a fourth voice. “I don’t like it; they can’t have gotten away that fast. We should take a look around. Anything this close needs killing.”

  Very close to him, Spider-Man could hear a rustling as if someone was gathering himself to rise. As softly as he could, he said, “Don’t do it!”

  Venom growled as softly. “If we do not kill some of these people, they will not show us proper respect.”

  “Not after they’re dead, that’s for sure,” Spider-Man hissed back. “And after they’re dead, we can’t follow them anywhere either. You just lie still for a minute.”

  The boat had gone quiet. “You hear something?” someone said. There was another pause, the silence dragging out so long that Spidey was tempted to say “Ribbit!” just to relieve the tension. But he had no idea of the quality of his frog imitations, and with half a dozen military-level automatics no more than a long spit away, he didn’t dare risk producing a bad one. He concentrated very hard on nothing bad happening.

  Spidey heard another squirt of static. “Come on, you guys. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover, and things to blow. North unit, echelon left; south unit, echelon right. Warm up, let’s move out!”

  “That’s a roger,” said the man with the nearest walkie-talkie, and returned it to a cradle on his belt.

  “He just loves to sound so damn military,” said another voice, a scornful one, from the boat.

  “Yeah, sure. And if you don’t want to give him the chance to use that military on you, get this thing started.” There was a cough as the engine turned over; then it caught and roared into life again. The flatboat spun neatly on its axis and headed off due east, so close to their reedbed that the reeds whipped and gusted in the propwash of the thing’s eight-foot fan. Had any of the men been looking behind them, they might have seen two prone figures lying in the reeds pushed flat by the wind. Then the reeds stood up again, and the boat was gone.