With a Little Help (25 page)

"But it's time to settle into the next phase. We're going abroad, and it needs a delicate touch. If
Canada
ends up in a firefight, what'll it be like in
Guatemala
?"

#

Lee-Daniel and his people had had to work around a lot of surveying constraints. There had been a burial ground at the Moapa River Indian Reservation that was freaking
perfect
for a repeater-array, with a commanding view of the entire goddamned Rez. But no matter how tempted the Paiute elders were by the thought of getting out of the cutthroat slots biz and instead taking a piece of every casino's action by offering secure connectivity for phones and data, they couldn't see their way clear to permitting CogRad's surveyor crew to head up there and start hammering in stakes for the repeaters.

The Akwesahsne Warriors took the cake, though. A fat, middle-aged man in camou fatigues decorated with pow-wow badges who called himself "Meatloaf" gave them a two-hour briefing. He had a topo map of the Rez and the surrounding areas stuck up on the wall of the school auditorium, and they sat around it in the fading light of the sun that streamed through the steel-reinforced windows.

"The areas that have post-its are strategic. No one except a Warrior goes within 20 meters of these."

"Sixty feet," Lee-Daniel translated for the surveyors and the antennamen, who were products of the American educational system and hence impedance-mismatched with the entire metric-speaking world.

"Sixty feet," Meatloaf said. "You'll know you've gotten too close if you find yourself at the bottom of a ten-foot pit with two broken legs. Don't go near the strategic areas, OK?"

Elaine stood up and began to pace the map's length. She unsnapped a laserpointer from her gearpig bandolier and began to hit each strategic area in turn.

"All the high-ground, right?"

Meatloaf nodded.

"The perimeter, too, right?"

He nodded again.

Elaine gave Lee-Daniel a look, then ran the dot of her pointer over each of the strategic areas again. Some of the surveyors groaned and whispered to the antennamen and the switchgirls.

Lee-Daniel cleared his throat. "Meatloaf," he said, "all respect, but well, this won't work. Our radios operate on line-of-sight. If we can see it, we can shoot it at half a gigabit a second -- slower if there are a lot of leaves and stuff in the way. If we can't see it, we can't shoot it. Zero bits per second. We need high-ground, we need perimeter, otherwise we're just wasting your time."

Meatloaf shook his head. "Radio radiates. I can't see the cell-tower, but I can still reach it with my phone."

"That's dumb radio," Lee-Daniel said. "If we want to have a conversation and we're out of sight of one another, we can communicate, but only if we shout. That's fine for us, but it's not so good for the people between us, right, Mortimer?"

Mortimer, who'd been through one or two (hundred) of these demos before, took his cue from outside the doorway, hitting it with the loudhailer dialed up about half way. "Right," he said.

"That's how dumb radio works. You had a bunch of bands that you could communicate in -- cellular, TV, AM, FM, cops, air-traffic, whatever -- and rules and licenses for each, governing how loud everyone gets to shout." Taking their cues, the CogRads started to gabble all at once, in stripes through the ranked chairs, saying "AM AM AM" or "TV TV TV" or "cellular cellular cellular."

"Smart radio --
cognitive radio
-- is much more clever. Instead of shouting loud enough to be heard across the entire distance, cognitive radios cooperate with one another. When I need to talk to Mortimer, I first check around to see what channels are least occupied and most close to me, then I send my message to the best candidate." He turned to Elaine, who'd come to stand by his shoulder. "Tell Mortimer that it's time to come back," he said.

Elaine turned to a switchgirl who'd positioned herself a few feet away and said, "Tell Mortimer it's time to come back," she said.

The switchgirl turned, but the next person in the chain, a customer service rep, had his phone headset in and was having a hushed support call -- it was faked, just part of the script, but he gave a good impression of helping someone tech a network problem at a distance, tracking a nonexistent support-script across his HUD and prodding at the air with a dataglove.

"Aha," Lee-Daniel said, "here's where it gets tricky. What if one of the radios between us is too busy to relay a message? We've got two options. We can wait -- which we'll do, if we have to, but it adds latency to the message -- or we can find an alternate path."

The switchgirl -- a network engineer he'd hired himself from a backwater DeVry at a job-fair in Tulsa, who ran a little to fat but was still broad-shouldered from her time on the rowing machine she shlepped compulsively from gig to gig, facts that Lee-Daniel could recall with ease even if he couldn't remember her name -- turned back and passed the word onto a surveyor who was standing a little ways out of the way, who relayed it to Joey Riel, who was by the doorway, who stuck his head into the corridor.

Mortimer sauntered back into the auditorium. He put the mic to his lips and boomed "You want something, boss?"

Lee-Daniel clamped his hands to his ears along with the rest of the crew. "No need to shout," he said to Mortimer. "Is there?" he said to Meatloaf.

#

"So, what's the critical path, Mac?" Lee-Daniel asked. "Who's going to run this circus between tonight and your
executive search
coming through with an empty suit to sit in the driver's seat?"

"We thought you'd stay on, LD, help with a smooth transition."

"Why would I do that?" Lee-Daniel said.

The Series A and Series B investors watched them like a tennis-match, silent, eyes shining.

"Why don't you two get us a couple beers, OK?" Mac said to them. They mooched off petulantly. "LD, I hope you'll stay on because you have a significant stake in this company. We don't want to dismantle CogRad, we want to
grow
it, turn it into something big and important. We need your help still, to make this work. It's your show, we know it. We can't make the transition without you."

He knew that Mac was blowing smoke, massaging his ego. But he was good at suppressing his ego for the good of his company.
The
company. Not his company, not anymore. "What's in it for me?"

Mac made a face and leaned in close, whispering. "Look,
they
don't want you to stay. I had to fight, hard, to keep you in, even during the transition. I put a lot on the line for you.
I
know that your job can't just be filled by a warm body,
I
know that you're the only one who can train your successor. We can make this company
really
big -- you'll be able to retire on your share in 18 months if we go according to plan. We're going to franchise out, start new busses in Latinamerica, Asia and Africa in four months, turn it all into a turnkey solution, something that scales. We'll raise 10 billion on IPO if we raise a cent, you just watch. I've been through this, LD, and I know what a success smells like. This will be a success -- your success -- if you play along. If you don't, well, we could all end up in the shitter. Canada was the last straw for them. We either go on without you or we don't go on at all, do you understand?"

The Series A and Series B men returned with a couple of novelty beers in aerosol cans. Mac and Lee-Daniel sprayed their throats with the brew and swallowed, making faces. This was high style in the circles the Series A and Series B men traveled.

"I see," Lee-Daniel said. "So I either walk out of here as interim CEO, knowing that I'm gone in a couple weeks, or I walk out of here fired. Is that the deal?"

"That's the deal," the Series A man said. "And I don't see anyone offering anything better."

MacDiarmid gave him a shut-up-asshole look, then spread his hands out.

"When I raised money from you, we did it over the course of several weeks. We talked to lawyers. They exchanged documents. I don't think it's reasonable for you to expect me to sign anything now without at least consulting a lawyer."

"You want several weeks?" the Series A man said, with mock incredulity.

"Half an hour," Lee-Daniel said. "I don't think that's too much to ask."

#

They settled for Warrior escorts for the antennamen and the surveyors. The Warriors were resentful at first, but they came around.

Lee-Daniel went out with a crew that Elaine was leading, up on the northern border of the sovereign. She had two junior surveyors with her, all of them loaded with positioning gear that tied into Galileo, the European GPS network -- the Galileo gear cost a fortune, but they'd found that their American GPS kit often mysteriously stopped working when they were working on projects in the territorial USA. They'd ordered the Euro stuff from a bunch of anti-globalization activists who'd found that the same thing happened in any city hosting an economic summit. Europeans were more likely to treat infrastructure as sacrosanct, while the US was only too happy to monkey with GPS for tactical reasons.

The surveyors and the Warriors kept their distance as they set out, one Warrior leading and one bringing up the rear. Elaine would call for a break every five or ten minutes and do magic with her many devices, chattering into her cellphone to communicate with the other crews, make sure they weren't overlapping or diverging too widely.

The woods had a high canopy, which was good news. When they started out, they'd focused on getting above the leaf-line, since leaves badly scattered RF signals, but they'd ended up with networks that were only reachable by people who were twenty feet off the ground. They'd blown a fortune downlinking the relays to ground-level stations with yagi antennae.

But then Lee-Daniel had had a brainstorm -- build the network
below
the leaf-line. Heavy canopy starved out any foliage that grew below the tree-tops, leaving a clear line-of-sight (modulo the treetrunks, which were largely RF transparent) on the forest floor. That pushed CogRad from a theoretical project to a real success, and Akwesahsne was just the sort of woods that the CogRad gear thrived in. Within a week, the entire Rez would be unwired at 500 megabits/second, enough connectivity to move whatever data they could find a use for.

The frontmost Warrior, a girl of about 16, started off treating Elaine's halts as a nuisance, but after the fifth one, when Elaine unshipped some especially tasty laser-based theodolites and a high-sensitivity digital altimeter, the girl's curiosity overcame her, and she crowded in close to watch Elaine work. She didn't say anything, but thereafter, it was clear that she was fascinated by Elaine and her masterful use of all her toys, bangles and bobs.

Elaine noticed it, of course. She was like a magnet for teenaged girls -- competent, beautiful, in charge. At the next stop, she handed the girl a can of pink spraychalk and directed her to mark the sight-lines. The girl almost dropped the can, but then recovered and puffed up a bit, marching off to lay down the hot pink lines. The Warrior at the rear, a man of indeterminate age who wore a camou balaclava, rolled his eyes, but that was OK; Lee-Daniel was figuring out a way to get him engaged, too.

At the next stop, a bare ridge that overlooked the woods on one side and the public highway on the other, Lee-Daniel tapped the other Warrior on his shoulder, then gestured at a travois on which Elaine's juniors had been hauling their satellite tester. He cocked his head, then bent down to take one end, and the other Warrior fell in at the other end. The two juniors looked relieved and hitched up their packs, breaking out protein bars from their belt-pouches.

And so it went. By the time they reached the next ridge, the girl ("Mermaid") had introduced herself, and the man ("Cobra") had done likewise, removing his balaclava to reveal a middle-aged face handsome but for the deep acne scars.

And so it went, for all the CogRad crews, who'd never had explicit training in making friends with the locals on a gig, but who had learned from the example set by Lee-Daniel and by the middle-managers who'd learned it from him.

Elaine gave Mermaid a cheap theodolite with an integrated compass, GPS and altimeter, and a little booklet on how to use it, and the next time Lee-Daniel saw her, she was leading a group of even younger girls on a series of surveying missions around the Indian School.

#

"Privacy, please," he said.

"We're standing all the way over here," the Series B man said, from across the little table. "How much more privacy do you want?"