Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  “And that bomb upstate?”

  Laurentz looked at him and shook his head. “That, interestingly enough, was a tamped device. Very effectively tamped, too. It developed a lot of radiation and did little actual destruction—though that’s little consolation to the poor people in that tiny town. They’re probably going to have to move now. The thing has irradiated the area’s plants pretty conclusively, and the damage is going to make its way into the food chain.”

  “Any indication, as yet, who was responsible?”

  “No. No one’s taken responsibility, anyway.”

  Spidey stood up and began to pace a little. A few seagulls wafted by overhead in the wind and the sunshine. “One thing we have noticed over the past few months,” Laurentz said, “the last six months, anyway. Our own technology is improving too, as you might imagine, and we’re getting better at analyzing ambient and background radiation than we used to be. We’ve been noticing an increase in the city ambient. Bear in mind, Manhattan is founded on basalt and granite, which usually have radon associated with them. But we know what that ambient ought to be, and the radiation we’ve been sensing lately is higher—as if Manhattan was running a slight fever. The only place you normally get readings that high is over by Fourteenth Street, where the earthquake fault is.”

  “What??”

  “The earthquake fault. Didn’t you know about it? It’s only a longitudinal. It’s not all that geologically significant, though every now and then it burps a little. CalTech keeps an eye on it for us, because when it burps, sometimes it leaks a little radon, we have to do street monitoring to make sure that people are safe.”

  “Burps, huh? How hard?”

  “Almost not worth speaking of. One-point-two, one-point-three Richter—you’d notice a heavy truck going by sooner. In fact, CalTech sometimes has trouble reading it because of the traffic vibration, but fortunately the transverse wave is diagnostic.”

  “The things you learn about this city,” Spider-Man said.

  “There’s an underground river there, too. Not naturally submerged, though—I think they diverted it artificially in the 1800s. At any rate, the last analysis of the radiation figures seems strongly to suggest that there’s a stockpile we haven’t located yet, somewhere in or on Manhattan—more likely, in it—and it’s beginning to affect the ambient of the substrate around it.”

  “Any way to tell where?” Spider-Man said.

  “Not specifically. The equipment is kind of obvious looking, and even in this town it’s hard to walk around the city streets with it and not be noticed.” Laurentz then added with a sad smile, “Not that we have the money to do it. Congress has cut our appropriation again this year. But there’s something down there. So far we haven’t been able to find anything, while investigating the CCRC records, that would cast any light on the problem.”

  “Well,” Spidey said, “let me cast a little light of my own.”

  Briefly he told Laurentz about Venom’s certainty that Doctor Octopus was involved, and the extent of the involvement. Laurentz looked thoughtful, then nodded.

  “I think I remember seeing a couple reports from the FBI and Interpol,” he said, “possibly S.H.I.E.L.D. as well, that he was connected to incidents in which material was being smuggled in from other countries. The problem’s been proof, until now. Octavius seems to have been fairly good about keeping himself from being connected to whatever’s going on.” Laurentz looked at Spidey. “Are you going to be investigating this yourself?”

  “I don’t see that I have much choice. You guys can’t do it—and if the situation is getting sufficiently dangerous then someone’s got to do something.”

  “Heroism,” Laurentz said, and gave Spider-Man another of those thoughtful looks. “Well. Maybe I can help. We have some fairly effective radiation sensors—sort of the great-grandchildren of the Geiger counter—though I have to admit that they’re best at close range.”

  “That’s where we’re likely to be,” Spidey said.

  “‘We.’ Two of them, you’d need?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re in luck,” said Laurentz, standing up, “because two of them is all we have. Just make sure you bring them back. I can sign them out for you, but if you lose them, I’m going to have to put off getting married for about thirty years—that’s how long it’d take me to pay back what they’re worth.”

  Spider-Man nodded. “Sounds good,” he said.

  “Wait here,” said Laurentz and went off toward the building’s roof door.

  About twenty minutes later he came back with a pair of harnesses, to which were attached small “black boxes” with LCD readout panels. Laurentz turned one of them on and showed Spidey a surprisingly complex readout panel, with a tie-in to a satellite navigation “finder” system. “Here. And here’s the manual.” He handed Spidey a small fat book about as thick as the Yellow Pages.

  “I have to read all this?”

  Laurentz grinned. “Just the first couple of chapters. The rest is detail.”

  “Couldn’t you just give me the Cliff Notes?”

  “This is a government document,” Laurentz said dryly. “Count yourself lucky that no one’s already arrested you.”

  “It’s the story of my life,” Spidey said. “Mr. Laurentz—thanks for your help. And please get the government to pay attention to what Ock’s doing.”

  “It’s always a struggle,” Laurentz said, “but I’ll do my best. Good luck, Spider-Man.”

  “I’m going to need it,” he said as he webbed up the two harnesses and the instruction manual, shot out a webline, and swung away.

  * * *

  SPIDEY went home to change, sat down, and spent the rest of the afternoon going through paperwork. Doris’s great sheaf of numbers still needed his attention, and the manual would have to wait.

  He riffled through the pages for a couple of hours, until figures and signal strengths were all blurring together in his eyes. He had long since given up looking at the “most frequently called” numbers, and was now concentrating on the numbers least frequently called, and the cloned numbers that had been least frequently used.

  There were, in particular, eighteen of these that were used only once. Peter looked carefully at all their associated readings—not able to make much of them—but there was one set in particular that matched up, for each of the cloned numbers.

  He reached out for the phone and called Doris Smyth.

  “Hello?”

  “Doris, it’s Peter Parker.”

  “Hello, dear! I’m sorry I haven’t had time to call you today; business has been unusually frantic. I don’t have anything new on MJ’s phone, I’m afraid.”

  “That’s okay, that’s not what I’m calling about. I’m looking through those printouts you gave me.”

  “Oh, dear,” Doris said, “I hope you’re not getting eyestrain.”

  “I am, but it doesn’t bother me. Doris, what exactly is ‘Ssth’ in this one column? The fifth column over?”

  “Signal strength.”

  “Hmm,” Peter said. “Am I imagining things, or do I remember you telling me that sometimes you could get location information from that little covert chip?”

  There was a pause. “Sometimes,” Doris said, “yes. If the signal strength is sufficient, the covert will try to locate itself in terms of the nearest cell emitters. If you know the emitter locations, you can work out where the phone was.”

  “Can you do that for a few of these?”

  “I’ll try for you. It may take a while. What page of the readout?”

  He told her, identifying the specific numbers. “One more thing before you go,” he said. “Am I wrong in thinking that it’s hard to get a bad cell phone signal in New York?”

  Doris laughed at him. “Dear, I’m amazed we don’t pick up conversations on our fillings. There are emitters every block and a half, it seems. If you’ve got a bad signal, it usually means that you’re in a building with an unusually effective Faraday cage, or one
with a lot more girders than they usually use these days, or you’re down in the subway.”

  “Faraday cage?”

  “It’s a network of wires or metal mesh that people use to protect computers from ambient RF radiation that might hurt their data. For example, I know one shopping center that had to build a Faraday cage around its two biggest department stores, because they were close to a big radio station, and every time the station came on in the morning, it would wipe out all the data in their cash registers’ computers. You don’t get many buildings here that need to be purposely caged, though. RF of that kind is rare in the States—the store I was thinking of was in Europe.”

  “Okay,” Peter said. “Doris—thanks lots.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll call you back as soon as I have something. Bye!”

  She hung up. Peter stared at the printout.

  In an old building—or in a cage—or in the subway.

  Underground.

  Peter thought about Hobgoblin’s hideaway, where the bomb with which he intended to nuke New York had been kept.

  I wonder—did he build that? Or was it just lent to him—or built for him?

  By Doc Ock, for example?

  Peter wondered. Before he started wearing the Hobgoblin suit, Jason Macendale was a mercenary called Jack O’Lantern. Macendale had always been willing to work for anyone if the price was right.

  No question but that Ock’s price would likely have been right, if he actually owned CCRC.

  Underground.

  He reached for the phone again, called the number that Venom had left on his answering machine earlier that morning, and talked into it rapidly for a few minutes, stating that he would leave a web-wrapped package for Venom on the roof of his building, telling him what it was, and where (in a general way) he intended to be.

  Then Peter hung up and started studying the manual, preparing for a night on the town—or, rather, under it.

  NINE

  A famous architect once said, “New York is an iceberg.” He was not talking about the friendliness, or lack of it, of the inhabitants or about the climate in the winter. He meant the infrastructure, in the original form of the word: the structure below the city, under the streets and the buildings. At least as many “built things” lay below the ground as above, and possibly more.

  Between thirty and two hundred feet below the streets of New York lies the biggest, most intensively built infrastructure of any city in the world. Miles of electric cable and fiber, tons of steel and iron in the sewers old and new; water mains, access tunnels, and conduits for steam and gas; and deepest of all, the skyscraper foundations, reaching in some cases four to five hundred feet into the bedrock. There are cellars and subcellars, passages between buildings, some used for years and forgotten, some newly built; train tunnels still being used by the mainline stations, and others long forgotten; the incredible tangle of subway stations, reaching from one end of the island to the other; and here and there, a secret that only two or three people knew.

  Down in the dark, in a subway access tunnel, Spider-Man was making his way toward one of them, on a hunch that Doc Ock might be there—or better still, that his stockpile of radioactives might be. Spidey had strapped one of the two AEC radiation sensors to him; his camera was in its usual belt-buckle holder, and he was as ready as he was likely to be to deal with Ock. Whether he would be doing it alone or not, he had no idea. One possibility—that he might have Venom’s help—was almost as bad as the idea that he might have to take on Ock all by himself. But, he thought as he leaped and sprang through the darkness, this is what heroes do.

  MJ had said it to him, when she came home and understood what he was going to do. “Maybe I won’t go in to work,” she said.

  “No point in that,” he’d said, holding her close. “I don’t even know if I’m going to find anything tonight. You go ahead and make money—we’ve still got that phone bill to think about.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Well, if things keep going on this way, not much longer! All the same, just one night off—”

  “No. They need you. They like you. You told me so. And you like working with them, and it’s good money, so you go on and do it. After the nightmare you had the other night, I think you deserve a little enjoyment. I’ll call you if anything exciting happens.”

  “On what? Doris still has my phone.”

  “Oh.”

  She chuckled and kissed him. “See how preoccupied you are. Go on, my hero, and do what must be done.” She threw her head back, looked at him levelly, and said it in her super heroine voice.

  He laughed. “Hey, pretty good. Just don’t get bitten by any radioactive bugs or anything now, okay? One of us in the house is enough.”

  “If you were in the house more often, I’d like it more,” she muttered. “And not chasing around after—Well, it’s not the chasing that bothers me. It’s the being chased. Venom—”

  “Honey,” he said, looking into her eyes, “we can’t do a thing about him. He’s here. If he comes near me with intent, I’ll do everything I can to clean his clock, but worrying about it just wastes energy. Right now I’ve got other problems. The city’s sitting on some kind of powder keg again—”

  “And here you come with the matches.”

  “Not me,” Spidey said. “I’ve got the extinguisher. I think.”

  “Go on, then,” she said and pushed him away gently. “You and your gadget there. Go do what you have to—and don’t be back late.”

  “Being late,” he said, “in all senses of the word, is the last thing on my mind.”

  It was still on his mind, though not last, as he paused in the subway access tunnel and looked out on the tracks of the Lexington Avenue local. Far down in the distance he could see the lights on the platform of the Sixty-eighth Street station. He was not headed that way, though. There was someplace odder he had to find again, and it had been a while since he had been this way.

  Doctor Octopus, over his long affiliation with the city, had become as familiar with its buried side as most people become with the parts of it that stick up in the sunlight and air. He had had several hideouts here and there, some of them obvious, some of them less so. Two of the more obvious ones, large subcellar spaces found or built under old office buildings, Peter had already checked. They were, as he had suspected, empty. Ock was too smart to return to spots that were so easily accessible. Spider-Man had wanted to look at them anyway to see whether there were possibly any radioactives stored there, as much to test his sensor as anything else. So far it hadn’t given so much as a peep. Nor would it, at the moment—Spidey had it set on silent running, so that it would vibrate against him like a hypertrophied beeper set on quiet if it felt anything. But this left other opportunities to be investigated.

  Ock was an avid reader of history, a pastime that had led him to some interesting discoveries, and the place to which Spidey was now heading was one of them. He looked both ways before crossing the tracks, jumped them and the third rail, and made his way down to the next access and maintenance tunnel leading away from them.

  About half a mile down this tunnel, he found what he was looking for: an old opening with thick sheets of heavy metal, like the kind they put down on the streets while doing repair work, riveted up over it into the masonry of the walls. The masonry here looked older than that elsewhere, and there was a good reason for this.

  I’ll have to let someone know about this, Spidey thought, and reached up to grab one edge of the metal sheet. He got a good grip, then slowly pulled. The metal groaned and began to bend, and masonry around it crumbled; screws and rivets popped out of the steel sheet as the whole business leaned toward him. Then suddenly it gave way. Spidey leapt aside as it crashed to the floor of the access tunnel and lay there, rocking and scraping against the wall.

  Slowly and carefully he stepped in through the doorway he had revealed and switched on his spider-signal to look around in the darkness.

  It was still pretty much as it had been:
the matte-masked glitter of dusty crystal reflected back filmed rainbows when hit with the red light of his spider-signal. Spidey stepped into the oldest subway station in New York City, and his footsteps echoed back from marble carvings and the inlaid terrazzo of the floor.

  He hadn’t believed it when he saw it the first time: a little station, with mosaics and beautifully carved bas-reliefs, and one track running away under the ground to a point about three blocks away. There was another little station, identical to this one. Both stations had crystal chandeliers and vases built into the walls for flowers. The other one had had a grand piano.

  During the 1800s, there had been a very wealthy businessman who had the idea that New York should have a subway system. He had taken this idea to Tammany Hall, from which Boss Tweed effectively ran the city, and set it out for the Boss himself. The Boss had laughed and said a crazy idea like this would never catch on—whoever heard of streetcars underground? And besides, the open-trench digging that would be needed for such a project would disrupt everything for years.

  The businessman did not have open-trench digging in mind. He proposed to tunnel completely underground and remove the spoil gradually from one end of the hole. The wits at Tammany Hall laughed louder than ever at this idea, and refused the businessman permission to even try.

  Being, however, a New Yorker of a particularly robust period, he acted typically. He went ahead and built the thing anyway, secretly, and at his own expense. Two years later, he invited the dumbfounded Tammany fat cats to come and see his subway.

  They did, and they were (against their will) impressed. They were willing to start building more such subways, but the rampant corruption of the Tweed administration had used so much of the city’s money that there was nothing to spend on such a project, and soon enough the Tweed machine was out of office. The new administration couldn’t be bothered with subways, and the businessman’s little project was boarded up, shortly after his death, and forgotten—except by one super villain who read his history books very closely. Doc Ock found it, used it as a hideout for a time; and in the middle of a particularly nasty and lively running battle, Spider-Man had followed him there, and they had fought. For a long time after, Spidey had thought with affectionate regret about how, if things had gone just a little differently, all New York subway stations might have had chandeliers and grand pianos.