Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

“An interesting approach,” Lieutenant Garrett said. “I must make a note of that one.” But by her smile Spidey guessed that she had read the idea in the same book that he had and knew that the author of the book, and the name on the space station’s new annex, were the same.

  “Am I getting warm?” Spidey said.

  “You know I can’t answer specifically,” the lieutenant said. But her expression was getting more wicked. “Hurry up, though. We’re getting closer to the hot zone.”

  “All right,” Spider-Man said. “So the spacefaring powers don’t want to manufacture bombs in space. Sure, there are others who might want to—various super villains and nutso dictators and so forth.”

  “I bow to your superior experience of the first,” Lieutenant Garrett said. “But as for the second, it wouldn’t make much sense for them to mess with space-based delivery systems, when conventional ones would be so much cheaper, and closer to home. Why bother with space when you can take a Mercedes across Poland and out its east side, and come back with a trunkful of enriched uranium?”

  “And a terminal sunburn.”

  “Only if you’re incautious.”

  “I see what you mean, though,” Spidey said. He frowned and thought then, while they passed another roadblock. Between them the brilliantly lit shapes of 39-A and 39-B lay in their way. It was dark and silent, except for its two big gantries, which shone faintly with red blinking altitude lights: the Fixed Service Structure, recycled from one of the old Saturn V launch umbilical towers and installed here to hold the lifts which serviced the Shuttles; and the Rotating Service Structure beside it, with the midbody umbilical unit that swung in and out to tend the Shuttle’s fuel cells and life support, which installed and removed payloads from the main cargo bay.

  The jeep started working its way around the huge octagonal pad. Spider-Man stopped, frankly gaping at it as they went by. Seen on television, from the discreet distance of a couple of miles, there was nothing terribly impressive about either of the pads. Seen close, they were another story. The massive gantries, the huge 400-foot flame trench, the big sound-suppression tanks, empty at the moment of the water which protected the gantries from the sound and pressure of launches—it was an extraordinary collection of structures, like a child-giant’s Erector Set put aside for the night. Spidey felt slightly embarrassed and turned to Lieutenant Garrett to pick up where he’d left off.

  “We all do it,” she said. “Gape, that is. Someday spacecraft will be smaller, and we won’t look twice at them. But right now—it’s still pretty neat.” She grinned. “Go on.”

  “I’m not sure where to go,” Spidey said. “Somebody’s putting reactors up in space to make something. If not bombs, then what? What other use is there for atomic energy?”

  He trailed off.

  “Yes?” Lieutenant Garrett said.

  Spider-Man shook his head at her for a moment. “Oh, my,” he said, very softly.

  She watched him.

  It had to have been ten years ago that he first saw the magazine article. He saw it now, though, as he had seen it last when he had been going through the aging collection of pulps that were still in the basement of his Aunt May’s house. Both MJ and his aunt had urged him to either seal them up properly in plastic bags and save for another generation, or just throw them out. Their covers were all faded, the pages were yellowed and brittle, and they would flake and come apart in your fingers if you turned them carelessly. He didn’t look at them much anymore, just kept them up on their shelf where he knew he could find them: old copies of Amazing and Fantastic and other magazines. The article he was thinking of was in Amazing. Someone, way back then, had suggested what they described as the only good use for an A-bomb.

  The problem was that to make it work, you first needed a delivery system that would let you get pretty large payloads into low Earth orbit, and build things there, like a space station, or a very big spacecraft. The idea in the magazine had involved building that huge spacecraft. At the rear end of it, a huge concave shield or vessel would be built as well.

  Then the premise of the article fell apart somewhat, because for that shield you needed an indestructible, or near-indestructible, substance. Once you had built this shield, the idea was that you started exploding atom bombs inside it. The shield, being indestructible, and ideally impermeable as well, would direct the blast away behind the ship, screening it from the radiation at the same time. And Newton’s Laws being what they were, in space as well as anywhere else, every action has an equal and opposite reaction: the force would translate itself into a push forward for the payload. Later, when the force from that push gave out, you exploded another bomb, and pushed again. And so you went, gently, slowly, accelerating patiently, on the way to the outer planets.

  It was a plan that was both brutal and elegant. It was not pretty. But fission power of this kind was easy to produce and relatively cheap—there was a whole lot of potential propellant for this kind of thrust lying around all over the planet, in the arsenals of countries that claimed they were planning to get rid of it anyway.

  Naturally, you would not start the thrust process anywhere near Earth. You would use chemical propulsion to get the ships out well past the moon. But once there, there was no question of pollution. Interplanetary space was already full of radiation as hard as a nuclear explosion. And the explosions would be, by Earth standards, very clean. Most fallout, after all, is dust sucked up by the mushroom cloud from the explosion site. In space there would be none of that. The solar wind would push the particulate matter out to the boundaries of the solar system and beyond the radiopause, where the minute particles could coast harmlessly out and diffuse themselves in the endless vacuum of near space. There was literally no harm they could ever do to anyone.

  Spider-Man knew the plan would work. He also knew how it would sound to some people if they heard about it. But the main problem left—now that there was a way to build space stations, and ships, in orbit—was what to make the shield out of.

  He thought of the hydrogel.

  “I would have thought,” Spidey said, “that people would have considered adamantium some time ago for—uh, spacebased applications.”

  “I’m sure they did,” Lieutenant Garrett said. “Think of the weight, though.”

  Spider-Man nodded. Just getting the pieces of an adamantium shield into orbit would use up so much valuable energy that it didn’t seem cost-effective. And besides, adamantium was metallic, and repeated atomic explosions near it would render it radioactive itself. Hydrogel, though… Spidey shook his head. It was just possible that among its weird properties was numbered a resistance to radiation.

  He looked at Garrett and said, “It’d be sensible, wouldn’t it? To send up hydrogel, and at the same time, to send up the—test material? That way you minimize the danger of sending the stuff up again with every new launch. While locking it in L5 orbit where it can’t fall, not for centuries anyway.”

  Garrett smiled. “It has to be tested,” she said. “It’s our cheapest way to the outer planets, until the new microwave-driven ships are ready.” And he looked at her and blinked at that, but she would say nothing more.

  The jeeps roared on into the night. They had come around 39-B now and were heading for A. It was about a mile and a half distant.

  “All right,” Spider-Man said. “Now all I want to know is, what do these people want? The reactor?”

  Garrett shook her head. “They’ll have to whistle for them,” she said. “The payloads were locked in two nights ago—what we had of them.” She looked both grim and resigned. “There’s no way to get that stuff out early. Cargo bay is locked for injection and can’t be unlocked without a full abort. Even if we could get the bay open, or those people could, it wouldn’t help them any, because the entire reactor is sealed in a prelaunch impact shell. We have—” and this time the grim look was completely unrelieved “—learned something about what happens when a Shuttle falls down before it makes orbit. A nasty but useful sideligh
t of that is that we’ve learned something about how to build things that don’t crack open no matter what you do to them—even if you drop them from a hundred thousand feet to the bottom of the sea. They don’t open.”

  “Even if the whole Shuttle blew—”

  “At whatever altitude. That shell would come down safe. Land or water, it wouldn’t matter.”

  Even if it blew… And he heard the voice say, earlier, We’ve got something to blow.

  Spider-Man’s mouth went dry. “Lieutenant,” he said, and touched her arm. She glanced at the hand, at him, said nothing. “Whatever you do, don’t let them near the Shuttle. Don’t.” And a horrible thought struck him. “They’re not in there, are they?”

  “At T minus—” she shook her watch free of her jacket cuff and glanced at it “—T minus two hours? Of course they are. They went up half an hour ago.”

  “Oh, my gosh.” A horrible feeling made itself at home in the pit of Spidey’s stomach. “Lieutenant, you don’t understand. These people are working with some of the folks who gave some of your New York friends so much trouble. They would have blown all of Manhattan sky high. You think a Shuttle and six astronauts are going to bother them?”

  Over the roar of the jeep’s engines, he could hear the gunfire much more clearly now, and closer, the incongruous sound of ducks quacking, outraged at the disruption of their quiet night.

  As they approached 39-A the sound of sirens got louder—and so did the sound of gunfire. “Looks like we have a problem in that department already,” said Lieutenant Garrett softly.

  Pad 39-A was seething with activity, like a hornet’s nest that had been kicked. Every one of the big Xenon spots was on now, lighting the place up like day. Endeavour burned white in the blaze of them, reflecting even more light in the area immediately around the pad. That was a help, except all the light showed was depressing. Jeeps and cars were converging on it from all directions, but once they came within range of the pad they tended to come slowing to a barely controlled stop, hammered by streams of bullets.

  “Oh, Lord,” Spidey heard someone moan from the next jeep. “The Shuttle tiles.” But there were more pressing concerns than the fragile thermal tiles just now. When the people inside the various arriving vehicles came scrambling out, it wasn’t to perform their security function but simply to take cover behind their cars. Nobody stood up or moved any closer, for fear of catching a bullet.

  Some of the NASA and Air Force security people already had. There were unmoving figures sprawled on the pavement here and there; others crouched behind any protection they could find. Except for their own increasingly battered vehicles, there wasn’t much of that in the big empty skirting surrounding the pad proper. They were firing whatever weapons they had at the attackers, but since those weapons were mostly pistols, they were badly outgunned.

  Every one of the mercenary assault team seemed to be carrying something fully automatic—submachine gun or assault rifle, the difference was academic when you were on the wrong end of it—and every now and then, to make things even more interesting, one of them would throw a grenade. They were even wearing body armor; presumably it had been stowed aboard the flatboat on the way in. The mercenaries had spread themselves more or less evenly around the circumference of the pad. They weren’t bothering with the short, controlled bursts recommended by the manual, preferring simply to hose slugs at anything that moved.

  As Garrett’s group of jeeps turned up into the pad area, half a dozen of the gunmen turned and began firing at them. The vehicles screeched to a standstill and Spider-Man piled out along with everyone else and hit the dirt. He came down next to the lieutenant, who was unholstering her sidearm and muttering under her breath. Spidey put his head up over the edge of the jeep—then was hit with a warning from his spider-sense at the same time that his eyes caught a red light, and hurriedly ducked again just before a spatter of bullets slammed into the hood of the jeep, making it rock on its springs.

  “They’ve got laser designators on those things,” he said, then glanced at the Beretta M9 pistol in Garrett’s hand. “Is that all you folks have?”

  “This isn’t a war zone,” she said, then flinched instinctively as another long stream of slugs chewed up the concrete paving behind the jeep. “Isn’t usually a war zone,” she corrected, starting to sound angry for the first time. “Normally we don’t need that level of security here.” Spidey could hear a hiss and crackle of static from the walkie-talkies of the people in the next jeep. “Jones!” yelled Garrett, “Jonesey—what’s their ETA?”

  “Three and a half minutes!”

  Garrett gave Spider-Man a small, tight smile. “That’ll be the choppers from Canaveral AFB. And they’ll be loaded for bear.”

  Spidey shook his head. “Three and a half minutes won’t be soon enough.” He cautiously put his head up again and saw an Air Force man stand up from behind one of the several jeeps spaced around the pad. The man’s pistol was braced in both hands and he was crouched low—but not low enough. He got off only two shots before a sparkle of bullet-strikes marched all over the jeep and the rest of the burst punched him backwards to the ground. But Spidey also saw a trio of mercenaries break away from the main group and start sprinting for the hole in the defensive perimeter that the airman’s death had opened. The gunfire intensified to cover them as they ran.

  “Not soon enough at all,” he said grimly. “Lieutenant, one of those guys has a bomb. I’m sure of it.”

  Without waiting to say anything else, he sprang out from behind the jeep and went after the running mercenaries, feeling horribly exposed out there in the midst of that vast, flat space with all those lights blazing down on him.

  A submachine gun chattered and Spidey leaped, rolled, sprang, crouched, then sprang again, changing course once or twice a second as the gunman tried and failed to anticipate his next move—especially since Spider-Man’s spider-sense effectively anticipated the gunman’s next move.

  I’m getting real tired of this, he thought, and bounded zigzagging toward one mercenary who seemed to have chosen him as his particular target. Spiders can move very, very fast when they have to, and for the last hundred yards of his approach, Spider-Man exploited that talent to the best of his ability, bouncing across the white concrete like a demented Ping-Pong ball. His final leap took him straight for the mercenary, and on the way in he somersaulted in midair so that he hit the man’s chest feet foremost. Spidey had a fleeting glimpse of shocked eyes in a pale, snarling face; then he felt the impact jarring up through his heels and heard the explosive grunt as all the air was jolted from the mercenary’s lungs. By the time Spider-Man landed in a half-crouch, the man was already flattened and out for the count, flakvest or not.

  Spider-Man scooped up the gun as it went clattering and spinning over the concrete, wrenched the long, curved magazine out of the receiver, threw that and the gun as far as he could in opposite directions—then a vivid red light glowed in the corner of one eye, a blare of his spider-sense, and he leaped and twisted in three directions at once. The concrete where he had been standing exploded in dust and splinters, and his ears were filled with the scream of ricochets. At least one of the mercenaries knew how to handle a gun, and the only thing that had saved him, various super powers notwithstanding, was that whoever it was had paused for that lingering, laser-lit instant to make sure of his aim.

  Spidey decided not to stand in one place for too long anymore.

  The next two groups of mercenaries were a good four hundred yards away on either side. At least that increased his chances, laser sights or not. Ahead of him, those three figures were running for the pad. Fire was still being directed at him from somewhere behind, but he let his spider-sense guide him away from the hail as he chased the trio. They, at least, were running too hard to shoot at him, being more intent on making it to the big pedestals at the base of the Mobile Launch Platform; but once among those, they could take shelter and fire as they pleased, while preparing to do whatever it was they ha
d in mind.

  Spidey thought he knew. If I was going to blow up the Space Shuttle, he thought, his face twisting with disgust at the thought as he jumped and ran and jumped again, I wouldn’t bother with the Shuttle itself. I’d go straight for the main fuel tank. It would have been full of lox and liquid hydrogen for a couple of hours, and he suspected that was why the attack had been timed for now. Someone knew the timetable by which the Shuttle was fueled and prepped for launch, and why wouldn’t they? It was pretty much public knowledge, and had even been included in the press package.

  He was beginning to catch up with the running men, and the one farthest behind was just within range of his webbing, if he was careful and shot it just so. Then the trio veered suddenly to the left, and as he caught himself just in time from shooting a web at where the man would have been, he understood why. They were quite close to the six great bells of Endeavour’s rocket exhausts, and directly under those bells yawned the huge flame-trench, a concrete chasm some sixty feet wide and another four hundred fifty feet long.

  Aha! Spider-Man thought. He took aim once more, and shot web accurately enough that he hit the last mercenary square across the arms and back with it. Spidey braced himself, and pulled. The running man stopped dead in his tracks and jerked backwards, his gun flying. The other two heard his yell and jerked squat black SMGs from clips on the front of their flakvests, blazing wildly behind them as they ran. But they didn’t stop, either to help their comrade or even to make sure of their target.

  Spidey dove and rolled as the slugs zipped and whined around him, then came up again and made a single huge bound to where the stunned mercenary was lying on his back. Picking him up, Spider-Man tossed him into the trench and broke his fall—with the web that still wrapped his back and arms—a good six feet from the bottom. The man bounced and swung like a mad bungee-jumper as Spidey secured the other end to the edge of the trench and glanced down at him.

  “Try getting out of that,” he muttered. The sound of repetitive and unimaginative swearing rose like a bad smell from the depths of the trench. Serves him right, Spider-Man thought and took off in pursuit of the others.