Spider-Man: The Venom Factor

  It was very cold three hundred feet down, very dark; but not very quiet. Outside the skin of the sub, the noise of near-shore seas rumbled and clattered and moaned against the hull—a muted chainsaw rattle of engine noise from ships passing overhead, the clunk and burp of bells or horns from nearby and distant buoys, even the occasional soft singing moan of a whale going about its lawful occasions. The man in the center seat of the submarine's bridge looked thoughtfully at his charts. He sighed at the thought of his upcoming leave and of the relative peace and quiet of being surrounded by air instead of water.

  The spot where he sat was not really the center seat, of course. Not yet: his boat was still three years off its refit. Eventually all U.S. subs' bridges would come to resemble the original one of a famous television starship, the circular design having eventually been appreciated by the powers-that-be as the best and most efficient presently available. But right now, the bridge of SSN-45, the USS Minneapolis, was still a tangle of panels and conduits arranged around the obstructive central column of the periscope. The captain's chair was no plush overseeing throne, but a folding chair stuck under the lighted chart table: not very aesthetic, not very comfortable. It was not meant to be. Captains spent most of their time on their feet.

  Right now, though, Captain Anthony LoBuono was sitting and didn't care who saw him. He could not wait to get this boat into dock and out again. Eight days from now, after final unloading at Greenland, he would get his butt off her, and the back cargo section emptied out once and for all. Never again, he thought. Never again.

  Realistically, though, he might be commanded to carry such a cargo again, and he would take his orders and do as he was told. In fact (and the thought made him twitch) it occurred to Captain LoBuono that, since he had managed this mission well enough, he might easily be given the same task again at some later date.

  He swore gently under his breath. He would not soon relish another week and a half like the last one. His crew were on edge, which was no surprise, for he was on edge: and such things communicated themselves, no matter how hard you tried to keep them under wraps. You should be grateful, he thought to himself. It's one of the things that makes your crew as good at their jobs as they are. They hear you thinking, anticipate you, jump faster when they have to.

  All the same, he would have preferred to pass on this last week's case of nerves.

  His Ex appeared at his shoulder. LoBuono looked up. Bass Lorritson—no one called him Basil, no one who didn't want a drink later spilled on them "accidentally"—favored his captain with a calm look that fooled LoBuono not at all. "Coming shallow as scheduled at the north end of Hudson Canyon, sir," he said. "Do orders mandate a specific course, or are they letting you play this one by ear?"

  LoBuono smiled grimly. "We're inside the limit," he said, "and safely under the birds by now. No mandate, except to avoid the Hudson Canyon/Barnegat lanes—too much routine traffic there. Plot us in toward the Coast Guard beacon at Democrat Point, and then take your preferred route to the Navy Yards."

  Bass raised his eyebrows, thought a moment. "Jones Inlet," he said, "East Rockaway Inlet, Rockaway Point, Ambrose Light, Norton Point, Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and up."

  LoBuono nodded. "Don't stop to pay the toll this time. How's the tide at Ambrose?"

  "About three knots, the CG says."

  The captain nodded. "Coast-creeping. I guess it suits the situation. Call Harbor Control and give them our ETA. Then call New York Yards Control and tell them I want that stuff waiting at the dock and loaded no more than fifteen minutes after open hatches."

  "Yes, sir."

  "I'm not fooling around, Bass. I don't want to linger."

  "I'll tell them so, Captain."

  "Go."

  Bass went. Captain LoBuono got up and stepped over to the periscope. "Depth," he said.

  "Two hundred, Captain," said Macilwain on the number-two radar. "Periscope depth in half a minute."

  LoBuono waited, staring at the shiny scarred deck-plates. It seemed about a hundred years, now, since he had reported aboard the Minneapolis at Holy Loch after returning from his last leave and had been handed the sealed envelope. That aspect of his life he was used to: usually a whole looseleaf binder full of mission info stamped "SECRET," which in the present scheme of things normally meant "not very." But this envelope had not been the usual color, but an eye-rattling air-rescue orange, and it had had the new barcoded utter-security seals in it. Two sets of seals: one for the envelope itself, and one for a package which had been waiting on a lowloader by the dock. The package had been about eight feet square, a metal case with a very large cordon of armed and jumpy MPs around it—an escort which, in a lighter mood, would have suggested to Captain LoBuono that possibly the President himself was inside. As it was, he went down belowdecks, swiped the barcode through the reader in his quarters, opened the envelope, swiped the barcode on the inside envelope, opened that, sat down, and read.

  And swore. But then, as now, there was nothing he could do about it, any of it—not the envelope, the box, or either of their contents. The box was loaded on, and he had told his crew not to ask questions about it because he had no answers for them. Then Minneapolis had headed out.

  The door of the secure-cargo compartment way in the back, where the uneasy MPs had deposited the box, was now sealed with the second set of barcode seals, and a sign which one of the MPs had slapped on the door at eye-height: "DANGER—RADIATION," with the familiar three triangles, red on yellow. At the bottom of this sign, over the past few days, some wit had scrawled in ballpoint, "SO WHAT ELSE IS NEW?" Whoever had done it had a point: Minneapolis was an attack sub and carried nuclear-tipped torpedoes—what her crew did not know about radioac-tives would fit in a very short book indeed.

  "FULL ALERT," his orders had said, "HOLY LOCH TO GREENLAND: TRIPLE WATCHES: RADIO SILENCE UNTIL COASTAL WATERS NY." And so it had been done. LoBuono had known what effect this would have on his crew. They were an intelligent and stable bunch—no news there: neither the stupid nor the unstable were allowed on nuclear-armed submarines. But it made them uneasy to be carrying out secret orders. It made them feel as if their superiors didn't trust them, and they didn't know which superiors to be annoyed with—the brass higher up or their captain.

  For his own part, Captain LoBuono knew how they felt. His annoyance was more focused. Without knowing what he carried, it was hard for him to take all possible and prudent precautions, thus jeopardizing the mission itself.

  "Periscope depth, sir," said the number-two radar man.

  "Thank you, Mr. Macilwain," LoBuono said. "Up periscope."

  It slid up before him, and he draped himself over its handles and peered into the hood. Someone had left the starlight augmenter on, so that everything in view glared green. He hmphed to himself, toggled it off, and looked again.

  Dead ahead of them he could see Ambrose Lightship, some six miles away, rocking slightly in the offshore swells despite its anchoring. He looked north toward Norton Point, got a brief glimpse of Coney Island, walked around the 'scope housing a little, gazing to northeastward, and saw the brick tower in the middle of Jones Island, with its pointed bronze-green top. He smiled slightly. It was a long time since he had pestered his folks on summer weekends to take him down to Zachs Bay near that tower, where he could sail his toy boats in the quiet water near the Playhouse—

  ". . . don't know," he heard someone whisper off to one side, partly behind him.

  "You think he does?" the whisper came back from down the Bridge.

  Silence: probably the sound of a head being shaken. "I think that's what's steaming him these last couple days—"

  This was the other thing Captain LoBuono hated about sealed-orders runs: t
he rumor mill that started running when the engines did and didn't stop until some time during the crew's next leave, if then.

  "I heard different." Another voice, whispering too.

  "What?"

  "Some kind of thing they're studying. Something they found."

  "Thing? What kind of thing?"

  Captain LoBuono swung gently around so that his back was broadside-on to the conversation. He looked idly south toward empty water, then swung slowly around to gaze westward, spotting the familiar landmarks: the Coast Guard observation towers on Sandy Hook, and the Sandy Hook Light, oldest in continuous use in the country; the low rise of the Highlands of Navesink, marking the southern boundary of New York Harbor.

  "I don't know. Something—not from here."

  A little further around LoBuono swung, toward the conversation. It stopped.

  "Verrazano Narrows," his Ex said.

  "So I see," said Captain LoBuono, looking through the periscope at the graceful upstrokes of steel and curves of cable. "Got five bucks, Bass?"

  There were smiles around the bridge. Three trips ago, they had come this way, and Bass had been easing Minneapolis out of harbor in storm weather while LoBuono attended to paperwork business in his quarters. A nasty unsuspected riptide had pushed Minneapolis into one of the stanchions of the Narrows Bridge. She had taken no damage worse than a good scrape on the hull, but Bass had been mortified, and the crew had teased him good-naturedly and offered to pay the toll for him if he wanted to get onto the Bridge that much.

  "Fresh out of small bills, Captain," Bass said.

  "Good man. Sound surface. Steady as she goes, then twenty degrees starboard."

  "Sounding surface." The usual clangor began. "Twenty degrees aye. Yard Control says our packages are loaded and waiting for us, Captain."

  "Very well, Mr. Lorritson. Surface. Anything from Harbor?"

  "Routine traffic west of Gowanus Bay," Macilwain said. "We pass eastward, starboard of the separation zone. Course to Buttermilk Channel and north to the Yards is clear."

  "Proceed," Captain LoBuono said.

  They sailed on up out of the Lower Bay and into New York Harbor proper, taking their time. LoBuono turned a bit again to admire the view of the skyscrapers towering up over lower Manhattan, or to seem to. He heard no more talk behind him, though, except the normal coming-to-berth chatter. "Tide's at two," said Loritz, the second navigator, one of the crewmen who had been whispering before.

  "Mind the Spider," Bass said. LoBuono's mouth quirked. The treacherous crosscurrents of that name, which ran to the starboard of Governor's Island, were what had caused Bass his old trouble with the bridge. But this time of day, with high water still two hours off, they were at their least dangerous.

  Without more incident they sailed on up through the East River and under the Brooklyn Bridge. Traffic on the bridge slowed down as motorists, seeing the Minneapolis's sail, braked to stare and point. Captain LoBuono smiled slightly with pride, but the pride did nothing to ease his tension. The sooner we're loaded and out of here, he thought, the better I'm going to like it.

  A few minutes later they passed under the Williamsburg Bridge, where the same slowing occurred, and then turned slightly out of the main East River "deepwater" channel.

  "Wallabout Bay," the second navigator said.

  The Navy Yards at last. "Down scope. Pop the top," Captain LoBuono said. "Mooring crew to the aft hatch. Down to one knot, Bass."

  "One knot aye. Mooring crew reports ready."

  "What's our berth?"

  "Sixteen."

  "Take us in."

  They crept slowly through the outer Shipyard harbor mole. Not much business came this way anymore, what with defense cutbacks and other curtailments on spending: the Brooklyn Navy Yards, once the talk of the world, full of half-laid keels and the rattle of rivets and air-hammers, were now mostly home for mothballed ships and massive lifting cranes whose hooks swung empty in the wind off the Harbor. Still, the Navy used the Yards for occasional nontechnical repairs and provisioning work.

  "Twenty-five degrees right rudder," Bass said. "Half a knot."

  "Five hundred yards, sir."

  "Very good. Rudder back."

  A crewman was working the wheel that popped the forward hatch. Captain LoBuono waited for him to get out of the way, then went up the ladder to get a look at the day and the mooring.

  There was a brisk wind blowing: it had already mostly dried the sail and the superstructure. LoBuono leaned on the sail's "balcony rail" and gazed down at the dock to the starboard of slip sixteen as Minneapolis sidled gently into it. The dock was stacked with plastic-wrapped crates and packages on dollies, ready to be hauled up onto the superstructure and passed down the hatches. Very slowly, very gently, the boat nudged sideways into the dock.

  Bump.

  And then, abrupt and terrifying, came the screaming hoot of collision alarms. The whole ship shook, abruptly, and shook again. "What the—" LoBuono started to mutter, and didn't bother finishing, as he dove down the ladder again.

  By the time he reached the bridge, Lorritson was already running out of the back of it, toward the source of the alarms. "Hull breach!" someone yelled at the Captain as he raced past them.

  "Bass!" LoBuono yelled at the back of his Ex, running in front of him.

  "Not me, Captain!" Bass yelled back. They kept running.

  Ahead of them they could hear the most dreaded sound of boat men, the thundering rush of uncontrolled water. They could also hear a slightly more reassuring sound, that of watertight compartments with automatic doors, dogging themselves closed. First Bass, then Captain LoBuono came to the final door, the one down at the far end of the weapons room, and found it closed as well. Behind it, they knew, lay the door with the "DANGER—RADIATION" sign. They looked at each other as they stood there.

  LoBuono grabbed a mike that hung nearby and thumbed its "on" button. "Bridge! Everybody accounted for?"

  "All accounted for, sir," said the Crew Chiefs voice. "No one's back there."

  "Get someone out in the water and have them see what the damage is!"

  "I've got a man out there now, Captain," the Crew Chief said. "One moment—" There was an unintelligible squawking of secondhand radio conversation. Then the Crew Chief said, "We've got a breach about a foot and a half by two and a half, from the looks of it. Deck crew are getting a temp-patch on it. We can pump out the aft compartment in a few minutes."

  "Go," LoBuono said.

  He looked at his Ex. Lorritson opened his mouth, and the Captain said, "Sorry, Bass. The currents in the Narrows are one thing, but I know you'd never make a goof like that in dock." He made a slightly sour smile. "Put it down to nerves."

  Lorritson nodded. "It's been—difficult," he said.

  "All around—"

  "Patch is in place," the Crew Chief said. "Pump's started."

  They heard the throb from the in-hull pump motors starting. For a few minutes more they hummed unobtrusively. Then LoBuono heard the coughing noise that meant they were running out of anything to pump.

  "Right," he said, and turned to Lorritson. "Got your dosimeter?"

  Bass patted his pocket, where the little radiation-sensitive patch hung.

  "If it turns any interesting colors, get your butt out of here," the Captain said. He turned the wheel to undog the door.

  Clunk! went the latch. LoBuono pulled; the door swung slightly open. He peered around its edge.

  His dosimeter, one of the new ones with a sound chip in it which essentially made it a small geiger counter, ticked gently to itself—a slow watch-tick, serious enough but hardly fatal. "Let's keep it short," the Captain said, stepping through and looking around cautiously.

  There was nothing to be seen but wet floor, wet walls, wet ceiling, and the silvery-gray metal crate in the middle of it all, as wet as everything else. Slowly LoBuono walked around it. The front was fine. The sides were fine.

  The rear of it, though, had an oblong hole about a foot and
a half wide and two and a half feet long punched through it. The bent rags and tags of metal around the hole in the crate were all curved outward. LoBuono's dosimeter began to tick more enthusiastically, as did Lorritson's when he came up beside the captain and peered through the hole in the crate. There was nothing inside.

  They looked at the hole in the hull, now sealed with pink plastic fast-patch. It very closely matched the one in the crate, both in size and in the direction of impact—from inside, punching toward the outside. Whatever had been in the crate, it had waited until the most opportune moment and then had left under its own power . . .

  Lorritson looked at the hole in the hull, reached out to touch it, thought better, and let the hand drop. "I guess we'd better call the lost and found."

  Captain LoBuono shook his head. "The lost part we seem to have handled," he said sourly. "We'll be in enough trouble for that very shortly, I would imagine. As for the found part—are you sure you would want to?"

  Lorritson shook his head like a man unsure of the right answer. "Come on," LoBuono said, "let's get on the horn to the brass. We might as well start the trouble ourselves as wait for it to come to us."

  But as they walked to the Bridge, LoBuono found himself wondering again, against his own orders, just what might have been in that box . . . and he shuddered.

  He had been in many strange and terrible places, in his time. He had been off Earth, on other planets, to other galaxies, even. He had faced threats terrible enough to make all Earth shudder, and had come away from them alive. All in all, he didn't have a bad record so far.

  But right now, Peter Parker stood outside the doors of the 48th Street midtown branch of the First Manhattan Bank and cursed at the way his palms were sweating.

  Behind him, the city made its accustomed roar. People on the sidewalk rushed past, going about their business, no one noticing the young man standing there paralyzed by his own unease—he refused to call it "fear." I'm a super hero, he thought. Why am I standing here twitching?

  No answers came. Peter scuffed one sneaker on the sidewalk, staring at the chrome and plate glass of the bank. He had never been entirely comfortable with the term "super hero," at least not as applied to himself. Some of the other people he consorted with in his line of business—mutants or other humans unusually gifted with extraordinary powers—seemed to him really to merit description with the word "hero": many of them exhibited a level of courage or nobility which inspired him and sometimes shamed him. In his own case, "super" couldn't be argued with. But the way he often felt while out on his rounds—frustrated, enraged, sometimes terrified—struck him as less than heroic. This kind of thing . . . this is different. Harder, in a way. This is just life.