Spider-Man: The Venom Factor Omnibus

by Diane Duane

  The pseudopodia lost their grip.

  Doc smashed Venom down on the floor. He lay there, still. The pseudopodia didn’t move.

  Spidey looked at him, where Doc stood looking down at Venom, only breathing a little fast.

  He barely broke a sweat, Spidey thought in thoroughgoing disgust. Look what he did to Venom. Venom! I’ve never been able to do that. And now he’s going to do it to me, again. And then he’s going to blow up the world, and my wife, and everything!

  No! I won’t let him win! I didn’t let him beat me when he dropped a ton of machinery on my back, and I won’t let him beat me now!

  He threw himself at Doc Ock, webbing like crazy.

  At least the fighting started with webbing. Where it went after that seemed oddly predetermined to Spidey, as if he were doing some dance whose rules had been established a long time ago.

  You shoot webbing at him, he shreds it up.

  You jump up on the ceiling and come at him from that direction with webbing and then with feet and fists. He knocks you back.

  You come at him again, hitting him like a cannonball, because all you can see in your mind is the sight of mushroom clouds everywhere, and your wife getting blown up—over and over and over.

  He hits you, but you always hit him back, because if you don’t, everything is going to die.

  Everything.

  Everything.

  You hit, you kick. You’re so hurt, it feels like you’re kicking yourself.

  It doesn’t matter. MJ wouldn’t like it if you stopped. “This,” she would say, “is what heroes do.”

  And when you stop, finally, it’s because the other party has stopped making the next move, failed to keep up the dance. You find yourself looking at a collapsed figure on the ground, terribly bruised and battered, metal arms lying helpless for the moment. And you wonder, irrationally, what you did wrong. Now, and all the other times.

  I did it.

  How did I do that?

  Spidey shook his head. Ock lay still. Off to one side there was a faint beeping noise. Venom lay not too far from it, groaning.

  Webbing, Spidey thought, and lots of it. He webbed Ock’s arms behind him, and his legs, and the metal arms too, with special attention to them so that they couldn’t work free. Then he staggered over to Venom.

  Venom was moaning softly. It was a kind of piteous sound, especially since Spidey would have liked to lie down and make it himself. “Come on,” he said. “Come on. Venom.”

  Wait a moment. Why am I trying to wake him up? I need to get out of here.

  Then he heard the little beeping noise again. He looked for the source, and his eye came to rest on a little silver thing, like a small cylinder. It had an LED display on the top, and a little button.

  The LED display said 56:04. Then, 56:03. 56:02. 56:01.

  A chill settled in the pit of Spider-Man’s stomach. He picked it up.

  The way everyone came. As if called. He had this with him.

  He let go of it.

  Dead man’s switch!

  He went to Venom and actually lifted him, picked him up: he needed all the help he could get. “Come on, Venom. Wake up! He’s going to blow one of these things!”

  “Wha—?”

  “Come on! We’ve got to find his computers.”

  Venom just sagged down to the floor. Spidey could only stand and stare at him for a moment.

  Then he staggered off down the hall toward Ock’s lair.

  Nothing was hidden there, which was fortunate as he had no time to search. Laid out neatly off to one side, in a sort of main control room, he found the radiation sensors, and all the computers up and running. The control room was deserted. Spidey suspected that a lot of Ock’s people had decided that not even the wages he paid were worth staying around for at this point, with an angry super villain and an angry super hero on the premises.

  He looked at all the computer screens he could find. There were a lot of them. One system, though, was running a program called inventory. There was a list on it. It was a list of hundreds of bombs.

  All of them said inactive. Spidey grabbed the computer’s mouse, scrolled down it. And scrolled. And scrolled—active, said one. It had a number. It had a location in latitude and longitude. Spidey double-clicked on the entry.

  A map of the World Trade Center appeared.

  Oh, no, not again!

  But it was the perfect place for an airburst. The closest you could come to one, without dropping it from an airplane. Maximum coverage.

  It’s going to kill thousands of people. Maybe hundreds of thousands.

  Spidey recovered his sensor, strapped it to himself again. “Got to warn them,” he muttered. “Where’s a phone?” He looked around desperately, couldn’t see one. “Where’s a phone? It’s been raining phones for days, why can’t I find one when I need one?”

  He caught sight of one, finally, between computer consoles. He grabbed it and punched numbers into it so fast he almost sprained a finger, that being the only part of him that was not presently sprained.

  “Not the voicemail, please not the voicemail. Thank God! Drew! Spider-Man!” he shouted. “Call the World Trade Center, tell them to evacuate, now, there’s a bomb! Yes, another one! Don’t ask, just hurry, hurry!” He glanced at the dead man’s switch. “Fifty minutes! Just get them out, get everybody there as far away as you can!”

  He looked for somewhere to slam the phone down, couldn’t find anywhere, dropped it on the floor and ran out as best he could.

  * * *

  OCK’S elevator took him up into one of the access tunnels below the Union Square subway station. He made his way up onto one of the platforms and took the stairs at a run, causing some very surprised looks among the commuters.

  The sirens had already begun howling. Spidey took to his weblines and swung like a mad thing across the city. As he approached the twin towers, he could see people streaming away from them. That suited him. And here I am, the only thing in the city except for the bomb squad going toward them.

  It’s all very strange.

  The sensor wasn’t giving him so much as a peep as he landed on the roof of the South Tower and headed for the stairs. “Come on, give me some help,” he muttered. But Laurentz had warned him that the sensors were fairly short-range.

  Airburst. Top ten stories, certainly. Of two towers. Wonderful.…

  He took the elevator down to ninety and started quartering the corridors of the floor, with the sensor turned up as high as it could go. Nothing. It took him five minutes.

  He ran up the stairs, quartered the next floor. Nothing.

  Ninety-two. Nothing.

  He had never been so aware of time as a liquid, like blood flowing, trickling away. Everything was going to trickle away. There was no time to even call MJ and tell her he loved her. No time.

  Ninety-three. Ninety-four. Ninety-five. Nothing.

  And on up to the roof.

  What if he put it below ten floors down? What if I miss it?

  He ran back up to the roof, shot a webline over to the North Tower, and swung over, took the elevator down ten stories, while outside the sirens howled, and did it again.

  Ninety. Nothing.

  Ninety-one. Nothing.

  Ninety-two.

  Damn them all, he found himself thinking as he raced down one more set of empty corridors, and the sensor didn’t say a thing to him. Ock, and his bloody Niner. They always have to gloat. Fire in the sky—he knew about it all right.

  Spidey stopped dead, panting.

  He did know.

  What was it he said?

  “—up there where the view and the food’s so superior—”

  My God!

  Spider-Man burst out laughing and ran up to the hundred-and-first floor.

  Seven minutes left.

  The place was empty. He ran down the corridor to where a beautiful wrought-iron grille stood, with a sign on it: windows on the world.

  He plunged on in. No one was there
; wineglasses sat abandoned on the tables, some of the most expensive vintages in the world, he’d heard.

  He stood very still, and turned the sensor up.

  Zzzzt.

  Not a very strong signal. He took a few steps toward one bank of windows.

  ZZZzzzzzt.

  No? The other way.

  ZzzzZZZZZT.

  Right up against the window, between two tables, he stood. ZZZZZZZZzzzzzt.

  A fairly strong signal. But nothing here to be making it.

  Six minutes.

  He moved away from the window.

  Zzzzzt.

  Weaker. But it can’t be outside.

  Where the heck is it?

  He went back to the spot between the windows.

  ZZZZZZZZzzzzzzt.

  All right, where is it? Spider-Man looked around him frantically.

  And suddenly saw, in the corner, not too far away, the spiral staircase, leading downward.

  He leaped down it, and found himself faced with a locked iron grille, with a beautiful little sign that said, wine cellar.

  Spidey laughed again. “Sorry,” he said to the grille, and ripped it courteously off its hinges, setting it to one side.

  The wine cellar was immense. Racks and racks and racks of wine, names like Rothschild and Grand Cru and Zinfandel and God only knew what else.

  He turned the sensor up, and began working his way up and down the racks. Three minutes left.

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ.

  He paused. Moved a little to one side—

  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!

  Two minutes.

  Spider-Man looked at the wine rack—and, down in the bottom, saw one of the bottles of Rothschild with an unusually thick neck.

  Very carefully, he knelt down beside it and eased it out. “About the size of a mortar shell,” Laurentz had said.

  More like a champagne bottle, Spidey thought, but never mind that now.

  There was a very straightforward-looking switch on one side, and a little LED that said 01:32.

  He took a deep breath.

  MJ, I do love you—

  —and this is what heroes do.

  Spidey threw the switch.

  The LED went out.

  Just to be sure, he sat there for much longer than a minute and thirty-two seconds. Nothing happened. Outside, the sun shone, and the wind blew.

  Inside, Spider-Man breathed again. Carefully, carrying the “wine bottle” under his arm, he went off to call Sergeant Drew’s office and MJ.

  ELEVEN

  MUCH later, Peter sat on the living-room couch with MJ and said sadly, “So only two more weeks of this?”

  “Yup,” she said. “Not as many stations picked it up as they’d hoped, so they’re limiting the series to twenty-two episodes. They’ve already got eighteen. I’ll be able to tape the next four, but that’s it.”

  “It’s a shame.” He hugged her. “But we’re in pretty good shape at the moment.”

  The phone rang. MJ got up to get it. “Hello? Oh, hi, Doris. Sure, he’s right here.” She handed Peter the phone.

  “Hi, Doris,” he said.

  “Two things,” Doris said. “One good, one maybe. CellTech will not be charging you for that phone bill. I’ve got eighteen of those numbers involved in an investigation into, would you believe it, cigarette smuggling.”

  “That’s great! Thank you, Doris.”

  “Anytime. My special service for famous people. The other thing—you were asking about location data on those calls? The Union Square subway station, apparently.”

  Peter chuckled. “I’ll tell Spider-Man.”

  “Yes,” she said, “and that’s another thing. When do I get to meet him?”

  “Uh. I’ll work on it.”

  “You do that. Let me talk to MJ now. Bye!”

  “Yes, Doris,” MJ said, taking the phone back. “Yes. Yes. Lunch? Sure. Where? You’re on. See you tomorrow.” She hung up.

  “You have a groupie,” Peter said, amused, as she sat down again.

  “I’ve had a groupie for a long time,” MJ said and hugged him.

  They sat looking idly at WNN, which was full of news about Doctor Octopus’s arrest and the unfolding of the nuclear and economic strands of his conspiracy. Spidey had had a chance to very thoroughly debrief on the subject—having been lectured on it by the perpetrator himself—and Ock was presently in the Vault, being debriefed himself, a business that would probably take some years. Various world banks were scrutinizing every piece of their currency. The AEC was running all over the American landscape, picking up and defusing small tactical nuclear weapons and weapons-grade plutonium.

  And in all this excitement, Venom had fallen right out of the news.

  “I wonder where he went,” MJ said softly.

  “He wasn’t in the caves at Ock’s place when I got back there,” Peter said, “but according to Ock’s computer, somebody printed a list of all the sites Ock shipped bomb material to. I suspect that he’ll be busy making sure the AEC takes care of it—and stepping in if they don’t. I’m still surprised he didn’t stick around, though.”

  “Maybe he was embarrassed at Octopus beating him.”

  “Or maybe he just wasn’t up for another fight. I kind of suspect that he’s not going to forgive CCRC or its baby, Bothwell, either. He may come back to haunt them.”

  “Better them than you.” MJ pulled Peter close. “What did Kate say about the pictures?”

  “Oh, she loved them. So, a little more money for the kitty, no Venom, the phone bill is off our case, and Doctor Octopus is locked up where he belongs.” Peter chuckled and leaned his head back on the sofa, repeating a line of Doc Ock’s. “Paradise on earth.”

  “It is, isn’t it?” MJ said and kissed him.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THANKS once more to Keith of the adamantium hide for taking the flak and staying with me down to the wire.

  Thanks also, in extremis, to Peter. If Guns & Ammo ever needs a demon typist, I know where they can find him….

  But I found you first.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  DIANE DUANE is the author of nearly fifty science fiction and fantasy novels, including ten books in the Young Wizards series. Four of her Star Trek novels have been New York Times bestsellers, including Spock’s World. She lives with her husband in rural Ireland.

  Visit her websites at

  www.DianeDuane.com and www.youngwizards.com

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