Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  Both now turned and fired again, as carelessly as before, then kept right on running. Evidently their orders were even more important than taking out the costumed pest pursuing them. But if they were relying on the hail of poorly aimed lead to keep him at bay, they had another thing coming. Then one of the men—a broad-shouldered bald black man—stopped beside the huge wall of the Sound Suppression Water System, smacked a new magazine into his submachine gun and dropped to one knee, while the last man—a tall white man who sported a ponytail—put on an extra spurt of speed.

  Spidey noted the one with the ponytail. That’s my boy, he thought. I’ll deal with you in a minute. But not this minute; right now he had all his work cut out to get at the bald guy who was shooting, because this one was good. Now there was no wild spraying of gunfire; instead the mercenary was ripping off quick, precise bursts of no more than three or four rounds each, and some of those were coming frighteningly close.

  Spider-Man jumped sideways, up onto the wall of the water tank, then scuttled and bounced along it, forcing the man to lean out from his firing position in an attempt to hit him. It spoiled his aim a little, but nothing like enough. Spidey still had to jump around like a fly avoiding a swatter—a nine-millimeter cupro-nickel-jacketed swatter—as bullets tore chunks out of the concrete all around him.

  Damn laser-sights, he thought, and shot a webline to the side of the tank with a slap of one hand, then launched himself outward, spinning more web as he went. The gunfire tracked him, but not accurately enough. That outward kick had given him more momentum than the mercenary had counted on. He swung out from the tank, then back in again in a sweeping parabola, and spinning the extra web had brought him downward as well, almost directly over the gunman’s head. Confused by the movement, the man triggered a burst toward where Spidey would have been had he swung in a second arc. Then the burst cut off short as the SMG clicked empty.

  That was when Spider-Man hit the wall again and kicked off once more—but this time right on top of him.

  The man’s reactions were very, very fast in that last instant before impact, because somewhere in the final eight feet of his drop, Spidey was staring down the barrel of the gun. Not that it did the mercenary any good. He was still fumbling to clear the empty magazine when Spider-Man kicked magazine and gun together out of his hands, then hauled off with great satisfaction and no small relief, and knocked him cold.

  The gunman had barely hit the ground before Spidey was off again after the mercenary with the ponytail—but he was still just a shade too late. He could see him, too far away to reach, as the man vanished into the gantry elevator of the Mobile Launch Platform. It wasn’t one of the open-cage elevators that he was familiar with from news footage of earlier launches. This one was a closed car inside the structure of the platform—and it was going up.

  The question is, wondered Spidey, how many floors will it stop at on the way? He leapt for the nearest other thing that reached all the way up, the Fixed Service Structure with its big venting arm halfway up. That was his best bet for getting at the external fuel tank.

  And that, he figured, was where Ponytail would stop. As he worked his way higher up and became visible from the ground, sporadic gunfire began probing for him as he climbed, the metal girders clanking and humming under his hands as the bullets struck them.

  The only good thing about that symbiote, he thought as he worked his way around the structure and out of the line of fire, was that its black hue made you less of a target. The ol’ red and blue does stand out a bit.

  He scuttled up the tower as fast as he could, leaping from one girder to the next. About halfway up, Spidey had a sudden thought, and spared a second, no more, to snatch his camera out, clamp it to a support, make sure it had free traverse, and flick the On switch for the motion-sensitive shutter control. He headed upward, relieved to hear the camera whine and turn and click behind him, reacting to his motion. Just as well; there was no time to fiddle with it now. Maybe four hundred feet to the top of the gantry, Spidey thought, looking up, and three hundred or so to where I’m headed. But could he get up there before Ponytail did? That elevator was fast. It had been above him the whole time he had been climbing, and was pulling slightly ahead. Spider-Man poured on all the speed he could.

  “These people are desperate,” he muttered to himself, “and this one’s probably the most desperate of the lot.” The prospect was unnerving; there were few things more scary than a terrorist who didn’t care whether or not he got away, just so long as he did what he was there for. They would blow the Shuttle right where it sat, and not care how many people went up with it. And after the fireball died down, if what Lieutenant Garrett said about the reactor’s protective shell was true, then it would be lying somewhere in the half-mile radius of scattered debris, ready to pick up and take away. There was probably another team somewhere out in the darkness, waiting to do just that.

  It was a chilling thought, and made him scramble up the gantry even faster. Then the firing from below died away. Spider-Man paused for just a moment to look down, and saw that the other mercenaries, the ones who had surrounded the pad, were pulling out.

  Uh-oh, he thought, knowing what that had to mean. They were clearing the blast zone. He started climbing again, and then above him saw the elevator slide to a halt at the level where the vent-arm reached out from the fixed superstructure to Endeavour. It was still attached, a convenient, if not exactly safe, bridge between one and the other.

  Then he saw Ponytail emerge from the elevator. The man walked straight out onto a wire-grating walkway that led to the venting arm, and Spider-Man practically flew up what remained of the tower. He shot a web at the wire grating, then hauled himself up at top speed, swung onto the walkway, and started running after the man. At the sound of his footfalls, Ponytail turned, pulled a big stainless-steel revolver from a tie-down holster belted around his waist, and opened fire.

  There wasn’t much room to maneuver on the walkway, and when Spidey flung himself aside he still felt a shock and a stripe of hot pain across his left side as if someone had hit him with a cattle-prod.

  Too close! Waaay too close! But he was still grateful that the slug had only grazed him. From the heavy boom of the gun, it had to be firing a Magnum load. Even with an ordinary bullet, that would have left a six-inch hole in his belly—and Spidey had an ugly feeling that to be so casual about firing right beside the Shuttle’s main fuel tank, this guy was using something nastier than plain lead slugs. He raised one arm, shot a web at the orange surface of the main tank, and threw himself off the walkway.

  The web hit squarely and stuck fast, and he swung right past the mercenary, out and down between him and the tank. He hit the insulated surface and clung to it, then twisted around and shot another line of web at that deadly gun, splatting all over its barrel. That barrel had swung to track him, but not fast enough or far enough to be pointing at him or at the huge cylinder of volatiles on which he crouched. Spidey jerked it out of Ponytail’s hand like a pin out of wet paper, then shook it free and let it drop into the flame trench nearly two hundred feet below.

  That was when Spider-Man got his first good look at his assailant, and saw, hooked to the other side of his pistol-belt, a package that looked like an ordinary black nylon fanny-pack. The man was unzipping it and reaching inside, feeling for something. Remembering the grenades that the other mercenaries had been using, Spidey leapt from the surface of the fuel tank straight at him, wondering at the back of his mind if he would make it in time, or even make the distance from such an awkward springboard.

  He did, and they crashed together, sprawling on the walkway and thrashing to and fro, only prevented from rolling right off by the protective grating to either side—and that was already bulged and sprung in three separate places. Ponytail’s hands came up, not wasting time with punches but with both thumbs already stabbing at where Spidey’s eyes were hidden by his mask. Spider-Man blocked, snapping his hands out to knock the jabbing thumbs simultaneousl
y sideways, then brought both of them back in again to chop the man hard under both ears. Ponytail went “Urk!” and tried to get up; then he sagged, his eyes closed, and he slumped forward until his lolling head clanked against the metal of the walkway.

  Panting, Spidey rolled out from under the unconscious weight and got to his hands and knees, trying to rip the fanny-pack off the mercenary’s belt. It wouldn’t come free so, very, very carefully, he dipped his hand inside and lifted the contents out.

  It was a bomb; very small, very neat, and though its contents were in a sealed plastic casing, he didn’t need to lift it to his face to smell that characteristic marzipan aroma of Semtex.

  The first thing he noticed was the little LED timer built into the casing. It had no controls that he could see, no buttons to push or wires to cut at the last minute. Just those little numbers, and even as Spidey looked at it, 48 became 47. And then 46.

  He would never have had time to get off here, Spider-Man thought. He doesn’t care if he dies. He glanced sideways at Ponytail. And right now, I’m not one hundred percent sure if I care if he dies. Unfortunately there are other people involved. Including me.

  When the bomb went off it would produce a fair-sized bang, but since it didn’t have a metal casing, there would be little more than blast damage. But if it was still too close to the Shuttle and its fuel when it blew, then there would be a really big bang, with enough shrapnel to scythe Kennedy Space Center clean. Spidey glanced about him, discarded the very thought of trying to swing from the tank again with a live bomb in his hand, and looked toward Endeavour’s wing—and the first thing he saw there was the large, red-lettered stencil that said No Step.

  “Oh, no,” Spider-Man said with feeling, and bounded up another thirty feet or so to where the body of the Shuttle was mated to the tank. He scrambled up to the side window of the orbiter and banged on it until a startled face inside a space-suit helmet looked out at him.

  “Out!” yelled Spidey. “Get out, now!” He gestured emphatically toward the far side of the Shuttle, and the entry/exit doors, and for emphasis held up the bomb with its LED toward the window. 34… 33… 32…

  The angry, surprised expression on the face went shocked, and the head nodded; a gauntleted hand reached out and slapped a control, and everything started to happen at once. A siren on the Fixed Service Structure began to howl, and as the big access arm began to swing out with smooth, ponderous speed, explosive bolts blew the Shuttle’s port door off. There was a jostling inside as people began to pile toward the door, then he heard the booted feet ringing on metal as the astronauts plunged out of the cockpit and into their elevator.

  “Good,” said Spidey aloud. 26 read the bomb, 25… 24. “At least I think it’s good.”

  He shot web up higher toward the lightning masts, and swung down past the Shuttle, leapt for the Mobile Launch Platform tower again, barely made it, then clung to it and began to web the bomb up. “Slowly and carefully, slowly and carefully,” he kept muttering to himself, a mantra of caution to offset the panicky speed with which his hands really wanted to work. I can at least confine the blast enough to keep it from setting off the main tank. But not if this isn’t done right.

  The bomb was about four pounds of Semtex—enough to make a reasonable hole in a building—and at the back of his mind he started trying to calculate the stresses involved. Then he gave up. Best to just get down off the tower and leap and bound as fast as he could in any other direction.

  Not just any other, he thought. Away from the lox storage tanks would be good too!

  He slapped one palm against the tower and fastened a web there, then began to let himself down, counting under his breath as he went. “Twelve, eleven, ten, nine…” Down below him, reflecting the intense light that flooded the whole of pad 39-A, water gleamed and rippled. And then Spidey laughed out loud and yelled, “Yes!” He knew exactly what to do.

  Of course, this still might not work.

  8… 7…

  “Well,” and he grinned inside his mask, “it’s been nice, world. Take your best shot, Spidey.” He quickly covered the bomb with as much thick webbing as he could in two seconds. Then he simply opened his hand and let the bomb drop straight down into the water tank of the Sound Suppression System. It hit with a splash and its four-plus pounds of weight cut through the surface as cleanly as a diving fish.

  Up, he thought, or down? There was no time to calculate the stresses or the trajectories, no time even for an educated guess. Just time for the body’s instinctive reaction, which was to get as far away from anything threatening as it possibly could. So he went up almost thirty feet in a single bound, hurled himself behind a girder, webbed himself there with two quick squirts, then closed his eyes and hung on for dear life.

  2… 1…

  The actual sound of the blast was a muffled whoomph, more felt than heard, a giant shock as though the concrete base of the pad had been kicked by some impossibly huge foot. Then there was a vast hissing splash, and an almost solid wall of water came erupting up from the Sound Suppression tank. Spidey had seen old newsreel footage of depth-charge attacks, and the columns of white water bursting skyward in the wake of a destroyer, but he had never dreamed he would ever be on the receiving end of one himself. Everything rattled and shuddered, and the Mobile Launch Platform vibrated like a gong. But as the water—and nothing worse than water—went flying into the sky, Spider-Man began to laugh.

  The reinforced concrete tank of the Sound Suppression System contained three hundred thousand gallons of water, designed to protect the launch structures from the protracted sound and blast vibrations of a Shuttle lifting off. Anything that could absorb those millions of pounds of thrust applied for seconds at a time before the Shuttle cleared the pad would have found his tiny pack of Semtex little more than a firecracker.

  There was a silence so intense that it seemed to clang in Spidey’s ears, and then, out of the clear night sky, it began to rain. It had soaked him on the way up; it soaked him again on the way down. And he didn’t care. Unhitching himself from the girder, he crawled back up the structure to where he had left the unconscious mercenary and his camera. Both were still there, though the double drenching with cold water awakened Ponytail enough that he was able to mumble incoherently, and Spidey’s webbing and its position under a girder protected the camera from the worst of the deluge. Spider-Man trussed Ponytail up with webbing and lowered him to the ground, then slowly, still being rained on and still chuckling about it, came down after him.

  It wasn’t over yet, though, not by a long shot. Down by the pedestals, a lot of the Kennedy and Air Force security personnel were waiting. The roar and rotor-beat of the big Blackhawk choppers from Canaveral was deafening as they settled onto the perimeter of 39-A, though several Apache gunships continued overhead to hunt for the mercenaries who had left the area once they thought the bomb was in place.

  The security people gathered around him, and there was the backslapping and applause more usually reserved for Mission Control rooms after a successful launch. Lieutenant Garrett came up to Spider-Man and smiled at him.

  “I must call the AEC kids in New York,” she said, “and let them know that you really are useful to have around in a crisis.”

  “Always glad to be of service,” said Spidey. A man in a space suit approached him. Spidey recognized him, even though the helmet was off now and the expression was no longer shock, but relief and gratitude. It was Commander Luks, from the press conference. He stuck out his heavily gloved hand. Spider-Man took it, shook it, then said, “Er, permission to come aboard, sir?”

  “Granted, son, anytime. Anytime at all.” Then he shot a thoughtful glance at the sky and looked at one of the NASA people. “Harry,” he said, “your weather reports have gone skewed again. Why’s it raining?” There was a lot of laughter.

  “Never mind,” said an older, gray-haired man. “We’ll scrub for this morning.”

  “We couldn’t go anyway,” said one of the other astronauts
. “All the water in the triple-S seems to have jumped out of the tank.”

  “Just be glad of it,” said Spider-Man, and turned to Garrett. “It was Semtex,” he told her. “Now, I’ve a question to ask you. This group was one of two. Another one was going south down a canal when they split from this one.”

  Lieutenant Garrett turned to one of the other Air Force officers. “Mike, didn’t you say that Coast Guard had been alerted about something going on down south?”

  The man nodded. “The James D. just moved out,” he said. “Something about a big dump of radioactive waste, and other contraband. A night-boat job, apparently. Whoever found it stopped it.”

  “I know who found it,” said Spidey. “I’m going to have to go.”

  “Not before you debrief,” said Garrett sharply.

  “Lieutenant, believe me, if I stop for a debrief now there’s going to be trouble. For me, and for a lot of other people. I’ll be back later, tomorrow afternoon maybe, or tomorrow evening. Then I’ll give you all the debrief you want. And,” he added, “I’ll have your hydrogel with me. But right now—” he looked at one of the helicopters that had settled out on the pad “—I came an awful long way to get here tonight. I’d really appreciate it if someone could give me a lift back.”

  On his mind was the little lab in the Everglades. Venom had clearly found whatever the other group of mercenaries was involved with. With that little matter attended to, he would surely head back up to the ’Glades, to the lab, and to the Lizard, in an attempt to finish his business there as well. And unless Spider-Man was there to stop him.…

  * * *

  IN the small, quiet stuffy room in the little lab building, Curt Connors stood over an apparatus, waiting for its little chime to go off. “This is it,” he had said to Fischer about an hour before. “It has to be. It can’t be anything else.”