Manhattan Transfer Read online

  Aliens kidnap Manhattan; read all about it. Manhattan is taken away and placed under a huge clear dome, through which the trapped residents can see dozens of similarly trapped alien cities. First published in 1993. Very much in the same spirit and scope as the 1996 film, Independence Day. Echoed in a small way by the 1996 Star Trek: Voyager episode "Displaced." Science Fiction Book Club selection. Reached the preliminary Nebula Award ballot. On the Science Fiction Chronicle best of year list. Rockies Award winner. HOMer Award nominee. Hugo Award Honorable Mention. Seiun Award nominee (Japan). La Tour Eiffel nominee (France).

  "Some ideas are just too good to pass up… the pleasure is in the nonstop action and the problem the characters must solve." -– New York Review of Science Fiction.

  "Considerable ingenuity…Think of it as a visually spectacular movie…and a really outstanding, imaginative, and professional production staff and special effects crew working to bring off the big set–pieces and guarantee the thrills." — Locus

  "How can you possibly resist?… Superscience SF in the classic vein, fast–moving, heroic…loaded with sensawunda. You'll love it." — Analog

  Manhattan Transfer

  by

  John E. Stith

  Manhattan Transfer was first published by Tor Books in 1993. Copyright © 1993 by John E. Stith. All rights reserved. Amazon Kindle edition published 2008 by Neverend Books. Cover art by Kavin King.

  Chapter 1: "Going Up" was published in Amazing Stories May 1993.

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  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1: Going Up

  Chapter 2: Free Utilities

  Chapter 3: Signals and Noise

  Chapter 4: Video Games

  Chapter 5: Gray Goo

  Chapter 6: Anybody Home?

  Chapter 7: A Tree Grows

  Chapter 8: Armed and Dangerous

  Chapter 9: Mechanical Failure

  Chapter 10: On the Loose

  Chapter 11: First Encounter

  Chapter 12: Archies

  Chapter 13: Trapped Like Bugs

  Chapter 14: Talk to Me

  Chapter 15: Damage Report

  Chapter 16: Throwing Rocks

  Chapter 17: Urban Disintegration

  Chapter 18: Demolition Expert to the Stars

  Chapter 19: Plan Nine

  Chapter 20: Enclosure

  About the Author

  BONUS: Excerpt from REUNION ON NEVEREND by John E. Stith

  Acknowledgments

  For the forces of change: Russell Galen, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Claire Eddy.

  And for volunteers who have suffered through early drafts with no reward: Joe Costanza, Lou Grinzo, James K. Sabshin, Bob Taylor, and Robert Woodhead.

  Chapter 1

  Going Up

  Manhattan never sleeps. It doesn't even blink. By three in the morning, it was as close to lethargy as it ever gets, but that was still busier than a nursery full of hyperactive kids with megadoses of sugar and caffeine.

  As something quite out of the ordinary began, Manhattan lay awake in the dark.

  #

  Slightly past the orbit of Saturn, over forty degrees above the plane of the ecliptic, ionized particles of the solar wind encountered a disruption where none had existed before.

  Space twisted. An artificial rotating singularity deformed the fabric of space, bending it in on itself until a black hole formed. Charged particles that would normally have sped directly through the region, instead began to move in arcs, most of which ended at the singularity. They accelerated as their paths curved tighter toward the gravitational lens, speeding faster and faster as they approached, and, during their final nanoseconds of existence outside the event horizon, spewing X–rays like tiny distress calls.

  The event horizon bloomed to a diameter of several hundred kilometers before it stabilized. While the solar wind funneled into the region, an enormous black starship emerged from inside the event horizon. The starship, almost as black as the region of space it slid out of, absorbed radiation across the entire spectrum as it spun sedately. As the nearby singularity was switched off, the event horizon shrank until it vanished, and the only obstruction to the solar wind was the ship itself.

  The huge squat disk–shaped ship sported octagonal rather than circular endplates. The disk was about ten kilometers tall, as thick as a small moon, and the octagonal endplates spanned over ten times that distance. The ship's spin slowed until it hung motionless in the dim starlight. The ship then began to pivot into the solar wind. The black ship kept adjusting its orientation until one octagonal surface pointed generally at the distant yellow G–type star. The precise alignment was at the small blue planet, third from the sun. Moments later, the enormous ship began to accelerate smoothly toward Earth.

  #

  The whup–whup–whup from the chopper's blades rose in pitch and volume as the pilot pulled back on the collective, and the chopper rose a meter off the concrete at the edge of Manhattan. The six passengers were all secured, and the sounds in the pilot's headphones were positive, reassuring. He let the craft hover a moment on the ground–effect cushion as he readjusted his shoulder strap. As soon as he felt in control, he let the chopper continue its rise. Below him the circular markings of Manhattan's East 60th Street heliport began to shrink. As he rose, he let the chopper turn slowly, and he scanned the space over nearby building tops. When the chopper faced the East River and JFK International beyond, the pilot pushed on the cyclic stick and tilted the chopper slightly forward, still rising as the craft began to move toward the airport.

  The pilot enjoyed the runs between Manhattan and JFK, particularly at times like now—the morning rush hour. This was one of the few jobs in flying where you could "drive" over the roads below in Queens. He took a lot of pleasure in passing slow–moving traffic on the Long Island Expressway, BQE, and Van Wyck, cruising right over the stalls and backed up sections, ignoring pileups and emergacharge trucks.

  He reached cruising height just before the East River. Below was the Queensboro Bridge, doing its best to jam more people into Manhattan.

  A sudden shadow was the first indication of trouble. Reflexes took over and he lost a little altitude just in case. If the passengers complained, he couldn't tell, because the headphones and the rotor roar would block anything up to a scream.

  The helicopter pilot had just convinced himself there was no problem when a faint pencil of red light cut the grimy sky vertically in front of the windshell bubble. He jammed the stick and tried to veer away, but he had no time. The whine of the rotors suddenly changed pitch as the rotor blades hit the shaft of laser light. The chopper became a machine gun, firing severed pieces of rotor off to his left. In milliseconds, the slicing light had whittled every rotor down to half its original length, and then the chopper itself hit the beam. A band saw moving at the speed of light, the laser sliced the chopper right down the middle. The engine overhead exploded as the casing surrounding the whirling components split into pieces.

  Shrapnel from the exploding engine perforated bodies of the pilot and passengers as the two halves of the chopper began their plunge to the East River. The pilot hadn't even had time to utter the one word traditionally heard as black box recordings terminate.

  #

  Matt Sheehan had heard little more than the roar of the A–train subway since it sped away from the Jay Street station in Brooklyn and lurched under the East River. He'd taken a small detour through Brooklyn after landing at JFK and taking the subway through Queens.

  As he stared out the window into the dark, he saw nothing except an occasional utility lamp as the car rocked on its rails. He was aware of snippets of conversation, but paid no attention. The morning rush hour crowd w
as so dense, Matt held his small flight bag in the same hand that gripped the overhead strap. The woman in front of him faced the door, pretending as he did that it was comfortable to be as close as lovers. The mass of bodies rocked with the motion of the car. Through the front of the car, Matt could see the lead car making small zig–zag motions.

  The woman suddenly turned and looked around angrily. She scanned nearby faces, returning to Matt's. Her eyes were green. Her skin looked tanned, but the smooth texture said her complexion came from parents rather than the sun. She said, "I really don't appreciate that." Matt got a glimpse of even white teeth.

  It took Matt a moment to realize someone in the crowd must have pinched her or touched her in a way even more intimate than the close contact necessitated. He almost said, "You sound like my wife," but instead he hunched up one shoulder and extricated his free arm from the mass of bodies. He held his hand palm out. "I didn't touch you," he said calmly. "At least not anywhere except here." His gaze flicked down to where her shoulder touched his chest.

  The woman, whose hair was shiny black, held his gaze a moment before she said, "I'm sorry," and started scanning other faces again.

  Me, too, he thought as the subway continued to jostle the riders, a giant hand rocking the crib too energetically. Matt felt tired. He hadn't slept well on the flight from Mexico City to JFK, and wished he had more energy for his detour through Manhattan.

  He let his eyelids droop closed, then popped them open a second later, when the car lurched violently. The overhead light went out. In the same instant, a shower of sparks splattered from somewhere behind him, and the screaming and shouting started.

  A rumbling series of loud explosions sounded, so many of them separated by so little time that the noise was more a high–speed rat–a–tat–tat than distinct booms. Matt felt his body pushed forward into the woman ahead of him as emergency brakes decelerated the car, and he felt a sudden breeze behind him. The floor of the car lurched again, and by the time the car jerked to a stop, the floor seemed to tilt toward the rear.

  As the screams and shouts finally gave way to angry and panicked loud questions like, "What the hell's going on?" directed to no one in particular, the car jerked several times and came to a halt in blackness. A woman's voice split the dark, yelling, "Get your Goddamn hand off me!"

  The echoes from behind him had changed texture and lengthened, as if they no longer came from an enclosed car. People began spreading out, and suddenly a man cried, "Hey—" His voice trailed off until an impact forced more air out of his lungs. A few matches and cigarette lighters pierced the darkness. At first all they revealed were the forward half of the car and a confused throng of people. And Matt drew in a breath as he realized what didn't show—the rear half of the car. He pushed his way toward the back as more cries came from that direction: "Oh, my God." "Harry, Harry! What happened?"

  As he got closer, Matt realized that the back half of the car was gone. He swallowed hard. People cowered at the sides of the vehicle, hanging on tightly and looking into the blackness behind the car. A man who apparently was the one who had just fallen got to his feet on the floor of the tunnel and looked up in surprise. Matt reached the severed edge of the car, and the temperature from packed bodies dropped noticeably. He took a deep breath and tried to control his fear.

  The subway car had been sheared in half. The metal edges of the floor, walls, and ceiling still glowed a dull red from the heat of whatever had done this. Matt had once seen the edges of a hole created by an armor–piercing missile smashing through a tank wall. That hole reminded him of these edges, but here were no curling can–opener edges, just the shaved nubs, looking like plastic cut with a very hot knife, a hardware–store 3–D model of how walls were made. On the floor of the car and on the clothing of a couple of people apparently in shock, were splatters of what could only be blood. In the air were musty smells of machine oil, ozone—and fear.

  In the tunnel behind the car, Matt could at first see only faint reflections from the rails. He took a tiny penlight from his bag. With help from the light, he jumped to the track bed, careful to stay clear of the extra rail on the outside, even though the power was almost certainly off. A couple of meters from the severed edge of the car he found a man lying on the tracks, moaning. Matt grabbed a hunk of fabric and pulled the man's leg so it no longer touched the rail. His heart pounded in his chest, but finally it began to slow as the initial adrenaline rush faded.

  The man's right hand was gone, cut cleanly at the wrist. He heard gasps from behind him. The wound seemed to be partially cauterized already, but blood oozed and pulsed into the cinders. Matt took the man's belt, looped it a few times around the bare wrist, and fastened it tightly enough to bar further blood loss. Quietly, in what he hoped was a reassuring tone, he said to the injured man, who probably couldn't hear him anyway, "Okay, fellow, I'm here. We're going to get medical help for you. You'll be fine."

  Matt played his penlight over the nearby ground, but he saw no sign of the man's missing hand. Behind him a couple of people jumped to the cinder track bed. He called toward them, "A man here needs medical attention if there's a doctor around."

  He moved farther down the tracks. The next couple of meters could have been the aftermath of combat. There would be no helping the people here. What was left of a man had been cleaved vertically just to the right of his head. The rest could only be described as large and mostly recognizable pieces of human bodies.

  Matt had seen casualties this horrible before, but he had always known why. Here he was totally confused. Was this the result of some terrible accident? Earthquake? The work of terrorists? Nothing made any sense. Somewhere behind him a nervous laugh got out of control and turned to a repetitive wail before it ended with the sound of a slap.

  He walked past the remains and stopped. Instead of the rear half of the severed car, or even empty rails extending under the river, here was nothing. The rails themselves were severed, butting up flat against a dark wall that completely blocked the tunnel mouth. As Matt came closer, he could feel the heat radiating from the dull–black surface barring the way. Water pooled on the tunnel floor. Where the hell was the rear half of the train?

  As he played his light on the mottled surface, voices behind him said, "What the hell is that?" and "Mother of God."

  Matt glanced behind him and saw an array of tiny flames piercing the black. A man in a business suit stumbled forward. "Agatha. Agatha! Can you hear me?"

  Matt walked back to the man, passing a couple of onlookers with lighter flames flickering. "I'm sorry, but unless Agatha is in the car you just came from, she probably can't hear you. Come on. We've got to get out of here fast. We're probably still under the river, and something's cut the tunnel. We could be flooded at any time."

  The suited man shook, his gaze directed toward the blocked end of the tunnel. The man who had lost his hand lay still on the ground, surrounded by three people who looked at him with horrified expressions, but weren't helping. Matt moved closer.

  "Help me carry him out," he said to the onlookers. He forced his voice to be calm despite his urge to run. "It's risky to move him because he might have a concussion or broken bones from the fall, but he's got to get medical attention, and it's going to be a while before any help gets down here."

  "What happened?" asked one of the three, a woman with dazed eyes.

  "I don't have any idea at all. Maybe a bridge above us collapsed. I hope we'll find out when we get above ground." He hoped the prospect of finding out more when they got moving would appeal to them, but he didn't give the bridge theory any real credence. This was something worse. How much worse, he had no idea.

  "Take off your coat so we can use it as a litter," Matt said quickly to the taller man, who wore a raincoat.

  The man didn't respond.

  "Come on." Matt grabbed the man's arm.

  The man took the coat off as though in a trance. Matt laid out the coat next to the injured man.

  "Come on," he sa
id as he knelt beside the man. "Help me move him."

  Like obedient automatons the three each gripped a shoulder or a leg and helped shift the injured man onto the coat. Matt took the edge of the coat next to the man's damaged arm so he could make sure nothing bumped against it. Together the four of them lifted the man to waist height and started up the tunnel. "If anyone gets tired, say so before you lose your grip. We're taking a big enough risk already."

  As they reached the severed car, Matt stopped to retrieve his bag, and he found some passengers were still inside the car. "Something is blocking the tunnel back there. Everyone who can walk had better get started. No help is going to be here anytime soon from the way things look. Walk forward to the next stop. Anyone who's in good enough shape to run should do it and call nine–one–one. And stay away from the extra rail. Move fast, but stay calm."

  Someone in the dark said, "My buddy says you can call for help from phones on the tunnel walls."

  "If you see one, try it. Otherwise just keep going. But help anyone who needs it. Who can pass the word to the people in the lead car?" As soon as he heard a voice say, "I can," he and the others moved forward with the victim. Seconds later Matt realized that a blinking minivid "active" light was tracking them as they walked. Whoever it was even had a pinhead lamp shedding dim light on the tunnel walls. Irritated that someone was photographing them, he said, "Take your home movies somewhere else, why don't you? We need to get out of here."

  A feminine voice sounded from behind the light. "This is for WNBC. What's your name, please?"

  The voice seemed familiar. As a man with a lighter moved closer to the person with the minivid, Matt saw that it was the black–haired woman whose shoulder had bumped against his chest since the last stop. Matt made no reply.