by Diane Duane
A second later he was rolling and diving into the bottom of the boat as the gunfire began from near at hand. He bounced up, sent tendrils rippling at the nearest gunman, tore the machine gun out of his hands, and flung it overboard. More tentacles shot out, one wrapping around the man’s neck, the other around his waist.
“Get him!” someone screamed, and someone else yelled, “Get the stuff out of here!” That was what he had been afraid of. A third man came running at Venom, spraying bullets. Pseudopodia ripped his feet out from under him, dumped him on the deck, grabbed his gun and twisted it out of shape, then flung it overboard. The symbiote’s excitement ran all through him, a sound/feeling like the purr of an angry tiger, all enjoyment and rage. If it could not have Spider-Man, it would have these miscreants.
Venom was willing enough, but right now a veritable storm of bullets was being fired at him, and a lot of them were hitting. The impact, despite the symbiote’s protection, was uncomfortable. He killed the man he had just knocked down, and told the symbiote silently to deal with the remaining man on the flatboat any way it liked.
It did. Screams resounded, and many shots began to go wild.
What Venom wanted to make sure of was that none of the men remaining on this boat had the key for the other’s ignition, or at least that none of them could use it. Within a few seconds, that was true.
“Get it out!” the man on the first motorboat was yelling at the men in the other one. “Get it out!” Its engines were stuttering into a roar again. Everyone from the flatboats who remained mobile was clambering over its sides, frantic to escape. And suddenly all the fire of the men who still stood abovedecks on either boat was concentrated on Venom.
The pressure of it was so tremendous that as Venom struggled to stand against it on one of the flatboats, the gunfire actually knocked him back into the water. He stayed under, making his way hurriedly toward the first speedboat under the surface. Spotlights were raking the water, followed by the downward-striking bubble traces of gunfire, and the thick, wet, dull sound of bullets hitting a noncompressible medium at supersonic speed. In the water, the roar of the second speedboat’s engine getting started was deafening. To this was added the sound of the first one’s engine starting as well. Too many of them, he thought to himself, furious. Just too many. He almost wished, bizarre thought, that Spider-Man were there to help.
He burst up out of the water near the first speedboat, swarmed up its anchor before they could cut the rope, and leapt on board. Venom simply backhanded the first gunman he encountered before he could turn and fire. He felt the skull crunch, and the man toppled overboard, backwards, hitting the water with a fat splash. To the second man, who was machine-gunning him earnestly. Venom strode up, took him by the throat, and let the symbiote throttle him.
A third man, seeing Venom come for him, jumped overboard and began swimming desperately for the other boat. Only the commander was left, and he pulled a high-powered automatic and pumped six very carefully placed bullets straight at Venom’s forehead.
The symbiote toughened there, but the bullets still gave Venom a headache. A pseudopod batted the gun out of the man’s hand, and another grabbed him around the throat, pushed him up against the bulkhead of the motorboat, and began to tighten.
“Where have you just come from?” Venom said, shaking the man slightly. The commander shook his head, his face suffusing dark red—
—and then he jumped and jittered in Venom’s grip, and slumped dead, riddled with fire from the other speedboat. The boat spun, its engine roaring, and it took off into Florida Bay. As it went, Venom could see the barrels being tossed overboard.
He swore softly again and tossed the commander’s body aside. Though he knew the general route these people were taking, it would have been useful to know more about the details, the way-stations. Oh, well. There are still three boats to examine. When he was finished with them, he would call the proper authorities and see that the hazardous materials were picked up from the boats, or where they had been dumped, and properly disposed of.
The speedboat that remained was just about empty. Venom noted its name and registration —Lucky Day, out of Bermuda. Not that lucky, he thought. He could find no trace of other identification in it. There were discarded weapons aplenty, but they could have come from anywhere.
After a few minutes he made his way back to the flatboats. On the way, he picked up the MagLite that one of the men had been using, and with it, examined the bigger barrels. They were all of them very like the barrels from the CCRC caches in New York. Some of them were even painted the same color. Standard fifty-gallon oil drums, nothing special about them—stuff that, if dumped in seawater, would rust quite readily.
More on his mind, though, was that smallest barrel—“the hot one,” the commander of the first speedboat had said. Very peculiar, that.
He got onto the first flatboat, found the barrel, picked it up. It was a plain, steel barrel, no distinguishing markings. Venom shook it. It sloshed very slightly. On close examination, the container was actually more like a paint can than a barrel, with a flat tight lid.
Venom put the container down on the floor of the flatboat, carefully pried it open with one pseudopod, and peered at it thoughtfully. It was full of a dark liquid. He lifted the can, careful not to spill it, and sniffed. A strange flat chemical smell floated up from it; nothing instantly recognizable. It reminded him, though, of the ink and toner scent of the fast copy shops he used to frequent back in his reporter days.
He told the symbiote to bare the flesh on his left hand. Cautiously, he dipped a fingertip of his right hand into the liquid and rubbed it between finger and thumb. Not an oily feeling but slick and then going tacky. Not corrosive, either. He rubbed a little on his skin, looked at it under the MagLite.
Venom’s mouth fell open. It was as if he had rubbed on a bit of liquid rainbow. A whole spectrum of colors chased themselves across the wet patch on his hand, becoming brighter as the stuff dried. He turned his hand, and the colors shifted, like oil rainbows on a puddle, never quite the same even when you tried to exactly repeat the motion.
Now what in the world—? he thought, staring at his hand.
Then the memory of a newscast he had seen a couple of months before came back to him, and suddenly it became clear to Venom why this, and not the waste, had been the most important part of the shipment.
The newscast had been a digest produced by one of San Francisco’s main news channels with information from the channel’s European affiliates. Among stories of folk festivals and the new plays in the West End of London, of troubles in Latverian politics, and the repatriation of Russian sturgeon from polluted lakes to clean ones in Finland, there had been a little feature about the European Union’s new paper money.
The European Currency Unit, or ECU, had finally begun to become the multinational currency that the Common Market’s architects had intended, even over the protests of some countries who felt that the power of their own currencies would be diminished by this interloper. There were simply too many attractions to a currency that had the same value right across the Union, now one of the three largest trading blocs in the world—a currency which did not have to be exchanged at constantly fluctuating rates. Once the quirks had been worked out of the underlying exchange rate mechanism, most of the EU nations had settled down and allowed paper ECUs to be printed for them.
The main problem, unfortunately, had been counterfeiting. Any currency so popular, and usable anywhere from one side of the continent to the other, was going to attract the attention of the most talented counterfeiters on the planet. The EU security people had been determined to do their best to stop this problem before it became serious by loading the ECU with more anticounterfeiting strategies than any one country’s banknotes had even applied before.
They created a counterfeiter’s nightmare. Its engraving was courtesy of the Swiss, in cooperation with the most talented stamp engravers from Liechtenstein. Physically, it was a work of art,
with the Union’s halo of stars and the intertwined national emblems of the member states all rippling and blending into one another across the faces of all the notes in a tangle of impossibly delicate engraving, in nearly a hundred colors. Any given note had embedded in it three discrete watermarks, various zones of microprinting, a band like the embedded silver strip of a British banknote—but this one of metallized plastic, microencoded and programmed with the note’s serial number and a one-hundredth-inch-wide data stripe containing other audit information. All these precautions seemed quite sensible in an age when counterfeiting advanced continually on the heels of the technology meant to stop it.
But there was one aspect to the making of these notes which was unique, and that was one for which the Union acquired a license from the French. The French had invented an ink for use in note-printing which changed color on the face of the note, depending on how it was held, what and where the light source was, and how the note was moved—the same way as, say, a hologram would change when moved, in a rainbow shift of color. It was the strongest of all the anticounterfeit measures on the ECU, for it was the one which anyone picking up one of the banknotes could instantly identify as being there or not. The words and pictures printed in that ink shimmered, giving a specious but beautiful illusion of depth.
No counterfeiter had been able to duplicate it. The secret of its manufacture was possibly the most closely held secret in France. As a result, that ink had become the single most sought-after substance in Europe by the criminal fraternity. More was being offered for it on the black market than would be offered for any illicit substance—more, even, than was being offered for plutonium. Several thefts had already been attempted, according to the TV program, but they had all failed.
A keg of this stuff—even a tiny jar, for small amounts of it went a long way—was literally a license to print money in as large a denomination as you liked—and the ECU notes went up as high as ten thousand, equivalent to about five thousand dollars.
Venom crouched there, watching the rainbows chase back and forth across his hand. A nasty scenario was taking shape in his mind. CCRC, he thought, or someone working with them, managed, somehow, to source some of this ink. Possibly someone high up in the EU in Brussels, some bureaucrat with something to hide, perhaps. And one of the major powers in the EU, right now, was certainly Germany. Venom thought of the German merchant bank and wondered if the connection might be there. Something else to take up with Mr. Gottschalk’s connections when we track them down.
But he could imagine a situation where CCRC or the people they were working with could print their own ECUs, as many as they liked, and use these to buy much more radioactive waste material from both legal and illegal sources—both of whom would accept the currency gladly. And this was only one of the kegs. They had tossed the other one overboard. If they had more, someone at CCRC was most likely this moment trying to analyze the formula. A skilled chemist could do it. It would take time, but it could be done.
Once they had a complete analysis, once they could manufacture as much of this ink as they liked, there would literally be no limit to how many counterfeit ECUs could be printed. The European market could be flooded with them in a matter of a couple months. The whole continent’s economy could be permanently damaged. Unless—
Unless someone who liked blackmail could hold its whole economy to ransom, by threatening the EU with just such an action, promising not to take it… if the price was right.
Venom carefully sealed the little can up again, and stood, willing the symbiote back down over his hand and shutting the rainbow away. All these possibilities would have to be followed up. But first—first he had business to complete, north of here. There was still the matter of Curt Connors, squatting in his little hideout in the Everglades, doing heaven only knew what—but doubtless up to his neck in this smuggling somehow. If he was…
Venom smiled. It was not a nice smile. Connors would find that he was about to be paid for his work, and not in the currency he anticipated.
And then, after that—Spider-Man.
With the little can of ink, Venom turned, and at the best speed he could manage, headed north.
TEN
THREE jeeps jostled through rough grass at Cape Canaveral, got back onto the southward-running road, and tore down it, sirens blaring and warning lights flashing. The first and the last ones carried men with guns. The one in the middle carried two NASA security people, an Air Force lieutenant, and a very bemused friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
“You could have had me thrown in the pokey back there,” Spidey said to the lieutenant sitting next to him. “You could have had me shot.”
“I could have,” she said, smiling a small dry smile, “but it seems a poor way to say ‘hello.’”
“Well,” Spidey said. “Hello, Lieutenant—”
“Garrett,” she said. “I’m a liaison to Kennedy security, based over at Canaveral AFB.”
“You’re taking all this very calmly,” Spider-Man said.
“I assure you, I’m not,” she said. “I could have had you shot, yes. And believe me, if the moment comes, I won’t bother contracting it out.” Her voice was cool and cheerful. Spider-Man gulped.
She was not a big woman—probably about five feet three, with short close-cropped red hair and big round horn-rimmed glasses. She looked a little like an owl. But the thought occurred to Spider-Man that there were some species of owl that he wouldn’t like to be locked up with, either.
“Anyway,” Lieutenant Garrett said, “if you’re asking me why I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt—I have some colleagues up in the New York offices of the Atomic Energy Commission. I chat with them every now and then. I talked to them a week or so ago, and it seems they think they owe you a favor.”
“If you mean the business about New York not leaping in the air and coming down on several other continents as dust,” Spider-Man said, “well, yes, I did help with that.” It seemed like the wrong moment for false modesty.
“Therefore,” Lieutenant Garrett said, “I am more inclined to trust you than not. What I want to know is how you came by the hydrogel. And how you know what it is.”
“Am I allowed to take the Fifth?”
“Oh, you can take it,” she said, “but maybe I could suggest that it would be less than helpful at the moment. The security of the United States is at stake just now, and I don’t have time for jokes.” There was something in her eyes, though, a mocking or daring look, even in the darkness, that suggested to Spidey it would be safe enough not to go by the book for the moment.
“Lieutenant,” he said, “the least I can do is give you the benefit of the doubt, too.” He took a breath, then said, “I found it after someone else had lost it. At least that’s how I read the signs. Having found it, I wondered what the heck it was!”
She chuckled. “Understandable. And? What did you find out?”
He thought for a second. “It may not strictly be an indestructible substance,” Spider-Man said. “I suppose adamantium has the corner on that market at the moment. But it’s close to one.”
“That’s a fair enough description,” Lieutenant Garrett said.
“Then,” Spider-Man said, “I found through other sources that it was originally destined for the Endeavour. Now, that by itself isn’t so extraordinary. Lots of things go up in the Shuttle. Birds, bees.”
She smiled. “Yes,” Lieutenant Garrett said. “And some of them more controversial than others.”
Spidey smiled under the mask. “Like the CHERM. Or should I say the MPAPPS? Or whatever its name was. As far as I can tell, it’s some kind of small reactor—and I think maybe it’s a breeder.”
The jeeps slowed a little; they were coming to a checkpoint. Away off on their right, Spider-Man thought he could hear the sound of gunfire.
“Well,” Lieutenant Garrett said, as they stopped and were inspected, “I won’t get into that. And what’re you all staring at?” she said to several of the security pe
ople manning the checkpoint, who stared at her companion. “Haven’t you ever had a blind date? Boy, some people…”
The jeep tore off again. “It’s been days since I had Socratic Method practice,” Lieutenant Garrett said. “I can hear the wheels turning in there. You know you can ask me questions, even if I can’t answer.”
“Well—” Spidey did his best to think through the wind and the noise and the sound of gunfire getting closer “—I confess, I do keep wondering why anyone would want to put a breeder reactor up in space. A lot of people are vague about what reactors are for, but breeders—” He shook his head. “There’s no two ways about it: they exist only to make more fissionable material. Specifically, to make plutonium.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Lieutenant Garrett said. “It’s common knowledge.”
“And the only use I know of for plutonium,” Spider-Man said, “is for making bombs.”
“Common knowledge would seem to bear you out there, too.”
“Well,” Spidey said, “who would want to make bombs in space anymore? With the new test-ban treaties in place, and the agreement that no one will try to militarize space, we’re not going to do anything like that. And it’s not like you could do it on the sly, either. All the crews up on Freedom, at the moment, are multinational; none of the participants have any secrets from each other. Not that there’s any room to, anyway. They’re practically living in each other’s pockets as it is.”
Then he looked at Garrett sidewise, as a thought occurred to him. “Other facilities are being built, though.”
Lieutenant Garrett returned the look, and actually batted her eyelashes, a shockingly innocent look. “Go on.”
“Yes, well, as I said, why make bombs in space? If you wanted to damage people on Earth, you might as well just drop big rocks on them. Cheaper, safer, and just as destructive, if you’re the kind of nasty person who’s interested in that. And there’s a whole moon full of them, just down the road.”