With a Little Help (24 page)

"
Enough
!" he said, and the loudhailer amplified his voice to staggering volume. At max, it was meant to be used to signal passing aircraft. Inside the vending-machine's claustrophobic bowels, it was like a bullet ricocheting through their skulls. Some of the more delicate antennamen dropped to their knees, their hands clutched to their heads, and Mortimer staggered back into Lee-Daniel, nearly knocking him off his feet.

Lee-Daniel cut the volume in half and hit talk again. The company shied back when the speaker array on Mortimer's bandolier
pop
ped to life. "All right, enough. Company meeting. Get chairs, sit on the floor, whatever. Right here, right now." He handed the mic back to Mortimer, who wiped it down with care and clipped it back to his belt.

He gave Mortimer his poker-chip. "Get a bag of ice for Joey," he said. "And thanks, man."

Mortimer gave him the cop-stare and trudged off to one of the vending banks and started prodding methodically at its display.

"All right," Lee-Daniel said, again, looking into the expectant, upturned faces of his company. "All right.

"It's been a rough week for all of us. But we've had rough weeks before. Remember Wisconsin? That was in our first year, and the FCC looked like it was going to impound every bit of gear we owned. We spent a month on the Reservation, borrowing and borrowing to pay off the lawyers. No one got paid. I ate enough venison and corn-bread to last me a lifetime."

Wisconsin was legendary. That was when they'd acquired the Series A investor, who'd converted its debt-instruments to capital when the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwa signed up their thousandth customer and started sending royalties to the company's e-gold account. Only Mortimer had actually been with the company long enough to remember the incident first-hand, which was good, since three quarters of the company had quit after the third week and he'd had to fire two more when they got caught hitting on some of the women on the Rez.

"But we saw it through," he said, looking significantly at Mortimer, who kept mum. "And we'll see this through. You might think that it was a mistake to go to Canada, and I understand why it might seem that way to you. But let me put your mind at ease.

"It wasn't a mistake.

"It was a risk that we took to expand this business. If you want your options to be worth something, someday, this company's going to have to
grow
. We've been growing at 20 percent per quarter for the past three years, and that's right on track. Maintaining that growth is going to necessitate excursions out of the USA. We'll be going back to Canada -- better prepared, wiser, more cautions -- but we'll be going back. The Caribbean, too. South America and Mexico. I shouldn't have to tell
you
that radio has no borders. Wherever there's unencumbered spectrum, we'll be there. There's
never
going to be a 'routine' job, whatever that means. Every job will be different. If you're looking for a 'routine' job, you're in the wrong business.

"We're headed for the Seneca sovereign in Cattaraugus next. There'll be a week of R&R there: fishing, hunting, gaming. They have a decent theater there that's doing a Beckett revival, and I've got half-price tickets if you want 'em.

"Half-price tickets for those who stay, that is. Because I want to make one thing clear: If you don't like the way I run this company, you shouldn't put up with it. Give me your notice, I'll cut you a check and you can get lost. That's your remedy. That's your
only
remedy. I'll be sitting right here, any of you want to give your notice tonight."

He sat down at a table and helped himself to someone's carton of crantini, gave it a shake to cool it down, then took a nonchalant sip.

The silence was broken by the door to the investors' dining room hissing open. The Series A investor stepped out into the chaos of the main concourse and crooked a finger at Lee-Daniel.

"We'd like to speak with you, if we may," he said, and swung the door wide.

#

Akwesahsne was supposed to be a cakewalk. The Canadian Radio and Television Commission -- Canada's RF Feds -- were softies, more worried with ensuring that 30 percent of the entertainment product on the airwaves was "Canadian Content" than with monitoring ultra-low-power, ultra-wide-band cognitive radio experiments in rural Quebec. The Mohawk Warrior Society, whose reservation was a Siamese twin with another Rez in upstate New York, were accustomed to the American way of doing biz, had even underwritten MBAs for a bunch of the bros, which explained the animated growth-charts back-linked to hundreds of diverse spreadsheets maintained by research committees across the continental Mohawk Nation infrastructure.

But they did indeed talk a line of bolshy horseshit in the Mohawk Warriors Society.

The first hint came from the guard in the pillbox at the Akwesahsne main-gate. The CogRadio magic bus pulled up, abuzz with new-gig energy, the anticipation of thirty skilled professionals who'd been crammed into a bus for four solid days, ready to tear each others' throats out. The gate-woman was all of seventeen, not that you could tell at first, so crufted-up was she with obsolete martian armor/arms and sensory array.

But once she came onto the bus for her customs inspection and removed her immersive headgear, it was obvious that she was no older than the switch girls who drifted in and out of the CogRad bus, using it as a means of making a little e-gold between footloose adventures in the Great American Heartland.

A seventeen-year-old with a defensive array of fast-acting anti-serotonin misters was a lot less threatening than a thirty-year-old would have been, and orders of magnitude less terrifying than a similarly armed innovation-sick fifty-year-old would have been. Joey Riel came forward, stinking of something between sweat-socks and Doritos, and greeted her in familiar, colloquial French, something flirty by the sound of it, and she gave him a wry, patronizing smile.

"Why do you speak French, Brother? Why not greet me in Kanien'keha, or Cree, or even Ojibwa? When we speak whiteman words, they make us think whiteman thoughts." She turned to the bus and gave them a long stare. "Hello, whitemen," she continued, "hello whitewomen. Welcome to the Mohawk Warrior Society autonomous zone. No weapons. No sex with First People. No drinks or drugs. No whiteman tobacco.

"Cook your own meals, wash your own plates, step lightly on the land. You can observe our nightly meetings if you are respectful, but it's more important that you come to the seminars afterwards. There are lectures, role-playing exercises, personal storytelling, theater of the oppressed, newsblogging, warblogging, linkblogging, puppet-making, outreach, filterbusting. Whiteman guests are welcome here, provided that they're willing to help the cause."

Lee-Daniel had heard variations on this speech before, but they usually came from hotheads who argued against renewing CogRad's maintenance contract, not the official greeter before they'd even started the gig. He knew well enough to take it in stride and move on, but Joey Riel was blushing furiously at having been shot down for insufficient indianity by this highly macha hottie, and so he waved some verbal dick, asking something in Ojibwa, all testicular.

She fixed him with a withering stare. "You're not the first apple I've met," she said. Apple -- red on the outside, white on the inside. "And you're not the most pathetic. But you're an apple and you've forgotten who you are, and that means that you don't mean anything to me except a sad story and a warning to other First People."

Joey Riel's hands balled up into fists and the investors shifted nervously. Lee-Daniel got to his feet and interposed himself between them.

"Ya-tay-hay, madam," he said. "Thank you for your welcome. Can you tell me where I should park the bus? We've got a lot of work to do today, while there's still light to work by."

#

"You need to understand, it's not
personal
," MacDiarmid said, for the third time.

Lee-Daniel set down his ridiculous second-hand crantini carton and climbed slowly to his feet. "*You* need to understand, Mac, that I don't
care
if it's personal. Whether you're forcing me out of this company, this company that
I
built with my own two hands, this company that is hitting every goddamned milestone, this company that is returning good dividends on your preferred stock, whether you're forcing me out because you're not
my friend anymore
--" he said this in a pinched, Mickey Mouse voice "-- or whether you're forcing me out because you think that it's 'for the best' doesn't matter to me at all. I don't care if you're doing it because you're protecting your investment or because your astrologer told you to, I still won't stand for it."

The Series A and Series B investors, who'd started off looking uncomfortable, visibly squirmed during this. They weren't accustomed to interpersonal conflict in the course of conducting their affairs. But Mac took it all in stride. Angels have to be prepared to slug it out to protect their investment.

"You don't get to stand for it, LD," MacDiarmid said, sipping at a frosty can of slushy ginseng-infused Long Island iced tea. "You don't get a say in it. When the investors are united, you don't have the equity to overrule us. The severance package is generous, the noncompete is lightweight, and you get to go with your dignity intact." He didn't need to add that fighting the board would mean a significant change to that picture.

"What'd they promise you, Mac?" Lee-Daniel asked. He'd shrewdly chosen his investors for their mutual animosity, believing that bitter enemies like the Series A gigafund and the Series B terafund would never come together, and that Mac, who'd been screwed on deals by principals from both funds, would never toss his lot in with them. "What do they have that's worth your throwing away this entire investment?"

"No one's throwing away anything. There comes a point in any business's life-cycle where the founders get out of their depth and we need to transition in a professional CEO. You've done a good job with CogRad, LD, and we recognize that, but if we're going to ensure steady growth, we need seasoned leadership."

"Seasoned?" He barked a laugh. "Mac, I
invented
this business! We're five years ahead of our closest competitors -- who only got that far by copying stuff
I
invented. Who the hell could possibly be more 'seasoned' than me?"

"You've never run a Fortune Five company," the Series A man said. "You've never had more than fifty people working under you. Executive search firms --"

MacDiarmid waved a hand crusted with three class-rings at the gesticulating Series A punk, who barely looked old enough to smoke. He'd only been out of B-school for a year and he'd only been on the bus for a month, but here he was, telling Lee-Daniel that they'd blown corporate funds,
money he'd earned
, on a slick-ass headhunter who'd spent it getting old frat-brothers laid at fancy hotels on Hawai'i while negotiating how much of Lee-Daniel's company they would end up with once they stole his job from him.

The punk shut up.

"Mac," Lee-Daniel said, sitting down again, pulling up a chair. "Come here Mac, take a seat, talk to me. I want to hear this from you, from the beginning."

Mac stood, exchanging significant looks with the Series A and Series B investors.

"Come on, Mac, screw that. You and me, end-to-end." That was CogRad jargon from back in the old days. The Internet was end-to-end, which meant that any two points could communicate without an intermediary interfering in the bytestream. In CogRad, you didn't talk person-to-person or man-to-man, you talked end-to-end, just like the connectivity they brought to the Rez. "I own fifteen percent of this company, same as you -- you owe me a decent explanation."

MacDiarmid stood fast.

"Get in the fucking chair, Mac," Lee-Daniel said, hating the whine in his voice. "If you want me to go along with this, get in the fucking chair.

"Mac, I'm sorry. Sorry if I flew off the handle. I'm a grownup, you're a grownup and we both care about CogRad. Get in the chair and tell me about this. Please."

MacDiarmid sat.

"Listen up, LD. You've done excellent work here. Be proud. You started something good, something that will grow and grow and that you can retire on. But you can't keep this up forever. If I thought for a second that you'd take orders from someone else, I'd offer to keep you on as COO or VP of Research and Development. There's no way, though -- no one would ever be able to tell you what to do in this company.

"You're great at the dirty work. You can get a crew onto a Rez, get the terminals sited and installed and burned in. You can boss a bunch of egomaniacs and social retards on long road-trips. For six years, we've needed someone at the helm who could do all that stuff.