and gave everything else I earned to Artie, to buy materials for the bicycles that gave the kids of B9 a chance: a chance to learn, a chance to grow, a chance to believe in the goodness and worth of other people.
But it’s hard to give hope to a dying planet.
All the time Artie was trying to make things better in B9, outside KanHab, life became more and more futile. Plants and animals died in the unfiltered sunlight, people starved to death, babies were born with mutations so horrible their own parents killed them. Brutality reigned, for life was short and ugly, and people snatched what pleasure they could; too often that meant the adrenalin rush gained by inflicting one’s will on someone or something else. How long the Reapers were a problem outside, I don’t know; but the day they broke through Security into KanHab is a day we will never forget.
They rode old combustion-engine motorcycles, powered by whatever alcohol they could manufacture to fuel them. Their philosophy was nihilistic: Earth and its inhabitants were doomed, so why not help them along the path to destruction? Whether or not they died in the process seemed of no consequence to the Reapers. Of the twenty or so who crashed the gate that day, only two made any effort to escape the certain death they found at the hands of KanHab’s defenders. But before they died, eighteen Security officers and over a hundred civilians fell to the Reapers’ projectile weapons—not to mention the people they simply rode down. Hundreds more burned to death in the fires they started.
Infrastructure at the gate, including the radiation shield, was so badly damaged that Admin sealed off the entire sector and simply built a new gate further in. They did nothing to repair the collapsed tunnels and fire-gutted buildings of A7 and 8. Why should they? Physical space was not what kept people out of KanHab, but the lack of food from our greenhouses. Housing was plentiful, and it was only residential areas the Reapers had terrorized in their eighteen-hour frenzy of destruction.
Artie got two months off from classes while he and other students helped repair the damage to the shield and other critical parts of the infrastructure. One day as we worked in C17 underground—Artie as field engineer and DeRon and I as his crew chiefs—the most strikingly beautiful woman I have ever seen approached us: tall and lithe, with high cheekbones in an oval face and dark, unblemished skin.
“Mr. D’Angelo?” she asked, and her voice was like thick cream, a smooth, rich fluid that spilled out and soaked into the thirsty air.
Artie was smitten; it was written all over his face as he stepped down from the ladder he had just mounted. “I’m Artie D’Angelo,” he said.
I tried to see what Saronda was seeing: a wiry young man well shy of six feet, with a flat gut and thighs like tree trunks; dark hair clumped in curls from sweating beneath his hard hat; red-rimmed eyes and two days’ growth of beard telling how little he had done the past forty-eight hours except work to salvage something from the destruction.
But she smiled, a smile as warm and sincere as it was brilliantly white. “I’m Saronda McCabe. I understand you build bicycles.”
She was an electrical engineering student, and her father worried about her travelling from her home in F3 to her practicum in C7. She thought a bicycle might be the answer. Artie agreed, provided she also got some practical training in avoiding danger—which he, of course, would be happy to provide at no charge. DeRon and I exchanged a look, then took our crew in search of some lunch while the two of them made eyes and traded compliments. “Ten ExCees he’s in her pants before morning,” DeRon muttered as we turned a corner.
I didn’t think so—she was high-class stuff—but I wasn’t stupid enough to take the bet. Good thing—I would have lost.
Once Saronda’s bicycle was made, we started swinging through F3 on our morning rides to pick her up for a couple of miles, after which she and Artie would break off and go their own way—because, he said, she couldn’t keep up with us quite yet. That was true, and they did stay with us longer as she improved. But she had a housing assignment separate from her parents—her father was high up in Admin—and within a couple of months we were picking up Artie in F3, too.
His bicycle building went by the wayside. All the kids in B9 had bikes by this time, anyway, and every Angel had a top-notch custom machine. On weekends he came back to B9 to check on the courier operation and hang with his pack, and he was still the same Artie: same huge smile, same warm laugh, same abiding concern for his neighbourhood. But the kids missed him, and some of them started acting out, breaking the Code. That brought him back for a while, because he recognized that his presence was necessary to keep them on track, to keep them believing. I worried more about him then, though, because when night came and things started locking up, that’s when he’d get on his bicycle and head for F3 to see Saronda. It was a bad hour to be out without your pack.
I told myself that Artie was making a terrible mistake, that he was headed for another fall like with Yvonne; but I don’t think I really believed that. He was too happy, and Saronda—blast her sculpted, perfect face—was a nice person. Genuinely nice. I liked her, hard as I tried not to. Once she came with us into B9, because she wanted to see where Artie and the rest of us lived, to meet the children and hear them recite the Code. “I wanted to join the Sisters of Literacy when I was younger,” she confided to me as Artie explained to a nine-year-old how the derailleur worked and the easiest way to replace a slipped chain. “But my dad wouldn’t hear of it. He pointed out that where we’re going—”
She broke off suddenly, and I saw the pain on her face before she changed the topic quickly. But I knew. I knew. And I wanted to scream at Artie for being so stupid, and at Saronda for not stopping this, and at myself for not shaking them both and making them face reality—but they were so in love. All we have here in B9 is moments. I figured they were entitled to theirs.
It was September when the transport ship arrived and began to load those who could pay the co-op fee for their passage off world. There was a brief stir of excitement as a renegade Reaper popped out from wherever he’d been hiding for ten months to throw a home-made grenade at the shuttle when it docked. He died with six crossbow bolts in his chest, and some heroic Security officer threw himself on the grenade so there was no damage to the shuttle. But I watched it all on the news without much interest, waiting instead for the tap at my window.
Artie’s grin through the glass was forced. “You gonna open up?” he asked. “Or let me hang on this drainpipe all night?”
I expected a repeat of the night Yvonne dumped him, because I knew what had happened: Saronda’s family was departing on the transport, and she’d chosen life off world—where you can live for hundreds of years in peace and comfort—over a couple of decades with a boy from B9.
But I was wrong. Her father had purchased Artie’s passage, as well, for Saronda’s happiness and because he found Artie to be a man worth saving, a man with a contribution to make.
“Then this is good-bye,” I said, my voice choked with my loss.
But Artie shook his head. “I’m not going,” he said, as though he had never seriously considered it.
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “You have to go, Artie. You have to get out.”
“And leave you guys here to have all the fun?” he asked, though his voice broke and his eyes swam with tears. “Naa.”
“You have to!” I shouted again, and I struck his chest with my fist. “You have to, Artie! For all of us! You’re the only B9er who’s ever, ever been offered transport out of here, and you have to go! You have to go where you can live for hundreds of years, you have to do it for us. You have to live all those years for us, Artie—you’re the only one who can.”
Still he shook his head, though it took him a moment longer to speak this time. “Naa,” he repeated. “Who’d make bikes for the kids? Who’d make them live by the Code? You saw what happened when I was gone for just a couple of months.” He smiled at me, though he had to brush his eyes with the back of his hand. “Besides,
I can’t leave the Angels. DeRon would go mercenary inside of six weeks, and Stash is already smuggling on the side—I’m going to have to come down on him before he drags the whole operation lawless: And you know, there are bike packs in five other sectors now, and three of them follow the Code. I’ve got to stick around and make sure it stays that way.”
“And Saronda?” I challenged, desperate for some way to talk him into going.
He drew a deep breath. “She thinks I’m already onboard. Her dad won’t tell her till they launch, he promised me.” Then he looked out my window as a bright streak of light flashed across the darkened sky: the shuttle leaping upward to meet the waiting transport.
“Damn you, Artie!” I screamed at him, as though I were the one he had abandoned. “Damn you, Artie, you
