Emergency Transmission

by Sean McLachlan

  Roy was about halfway through his breakfast when the door opened. Pablo Cruz, the ten-year-old son of his old bouncer, peeked through.

  “Pablo, my man, come on in!” Roy said.

  Sunday mornings were brothers only, but Pablo was an exception. Pablo was an exception to everything.

  The others greeted him as he entered. He hurried over to Roy and gave him a big hug. Roy wrapped his arms around him.

  “Head versus belly?” the boy asked, looking up.

  “Ha! You’ve never won once,” Roy said as he stood up. Pablo backed up and headbutted Roy’s giant beer belly, bouncing off and staggering back.

  “Told you. Belly always wins.”

  “One more time!”

  “OK.”

  Pablo bounced off again.

  “Ooof, that’s enough. You don’t want my breakfast all over you.”

  “Hey Pablo!” Ethan called. “Malik needs your help over here.”

  Pablo headed over to the chess table and plopped down in Malik’s lap.

  “Ethan here thinks he’s got me just because he’s got me in check,” Malik said. “But we know better, don’t we? There’s a way to turn this around.”

  Pablo studied the board for a second. Everyone watched him. Even Caleb looked up from his book.

  “I think you’re going to have to sacrifice your bishop,” Pablo said.

  The crowd bust out laughing.

  “Everyone’s an expert!” Malik grumbled. “No, check this out.”

  Malik moved his knight.

  “Mis-taaaaaake!” Pablo said.

  Ethan countered with his queen. Malik grunted and got his knight out of danger. Ethan shifted his rook.

  “Check,” Ethan said.

  “Not anymore,” Malik said, nudging his king to the next square.

  “You’re right,” Ethan said, shifting his queen. “Now it’s checkmate.”

  “Damn!”

  “You should have sacrificed your bishop,” Jamal said.

  “You totally should have sacrificed your bishop,” Pablo agreed.

  “Get off, wiseass,” Malik said, bucking his leg so a grinning Pablo jumped to his feet.

  The kid looked over at Caleb. “Whoa, that’s a huge book. What’s is it?”

  Caleb held up the book. “You tell me. You can read as good as I do.”

  Pablo walked over and read aloud. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X. That’s a weird name.”

  “He didn’t want to use the name his slave master gave him so he ‘X’ed it out.”

  “He lived in the Third Republic?”

  “No, before that. Back in the 1960s. They didn’t have slavery then but the people were still treated like slaves.”

  “So he was like that other guy? The Third Republic guy?”

  “You mean General Walker? No, brother Malcolm fought with words, not tanks. That’s always the better way to fight if you’re given that luxury. I’ll lend this to you when you’re older. Worth reading not just for the history but the way brother Malcolm changed over time. He was able to change his ideas when he saw they needed changing. Not once but several times.”

  “What’s an autobiography?” Pablo asked, craning his neck around the cover to peer at the pages.

  “A book you write about your own life.”

  Pablo’s eyes lit up. “I should do that about my adventure in the wildlands!”

  Caleb smiled. “You were the hero of the hour. I think you’re going to have more adventures than that, though. Wait until you’re older before you write your autobiography.”

  Caleb’s words seemed to remind the boy of something. He spun around and hurried back to Roy.

  “Can we talk?” he whispered into his ear.

  “Sure,” Roy got up and moved to the other side of the room, heart beating fast and then skipping a beat. This sounded serious, and a kid living in the Burbs ran up against a lot of serious shit. That’s why Annette tried so hard to get citizenship.

  “What’s the matter?” Roy asked.

  “Can you take me to see The Doctor?” Pablo whispered.

  Roy put a hand on the boy’s forehead. “You sick?”

  “No, but … um, I need to talk to him, and I can’t go with Mom because they hate each other.”

  “They don’t hate each other.”—“loathe” would be the better word—“So what’s up?”

  “I, um, have something to tell him.”

  “What?”

  Pablo glanced at the others and rolled his eyes. “It’s kinda secret.”

  Roy frowned. What was the boy talking about?

  “All right, let’s go. Gentlemen, carry on without me. I’ll be back as soon as I can. Malik, next time sacrifice your bishop.”

  They found The Doctor in his office, arranging medicine with Yu-jin.

  “Ni hao,” Pablo said.

  “Ni hao,” Yu-jin replied with a smile.

  “You teaching him Chinese?” Roy asked.

  “Mandarin. There are actually several languages in China,” Pablo informed him.

  “Oh, I see,” Roy said.

  “You’re Annette’s son, right?” The Doctor asked. “What seems to be the trouble?”

  Pablo looked down at his feet, suddenly nervous. The Doctor could have that effect on people.

  When the boy didn’t reply, The Doctor continued.

  “You’re not feeling well?”

  “I’m not sick,” Pablo whispered.

  Roy looked at him with rising concern. What was going on?

  The Doctor looked at Yu-jin and smiled.

  “Well you seem to be part of a trend there, kid. The last time someone came in here who wasn’t sick, she turned everything upside down.”

  Yu-jin smiled back at The Doctor. When Pablo didn’t reply, she went over and stroked his hair.

  “What’s the matter? Is there some trouble? Here, sit down.”

  They moved to The Doctor’s living room. Pablo plunked down on the sofa between Roy and Yu-jin while The Doctor stood over him, impatiently clicking a ballpoint pen open and closed.

  Damn it, Doc. How about a bit of bedside manner?

  “Kid, I don’t have much time,” The Doctor said, obviously getting to the limits of his patience, which didn’t take much.

  “The ship is in trouble,” Pablo mumbled.

  “What? You mean the Chinese freighter?”

  “The Admiral Zeng He,” Pablo said.

  “I know what it’s called. Did you see it?”

  Pablo shook his head.

  The Doctor let out an exasperated sigh. “Then how do you know?”

  Roy wondered the same thing. When he looked at Yu-jin, he saw her looking at the boy with understanding in her eyes.

  What’s going on between those two?

  Pablo glanced at The Doctor and quickly looked away.

  “Can you keep a secret?” the boy asked.

  The Doctor sighed. “Sure.”

  “I … talked with them.”

  “How?” The Doctor and Roy asked together.

  “Captain Wang gave me a radio.”

  “What!” The Doctor shouted so loudly it made Pablo flinch. “What do you mean he gave you a radio?”

  “I had to smash the other one so those guards didn’t blow up the ship.”

  “So you’ve been chatting with the ship this whole time and never bothered to tell me? Is this Captain Wang’s idea of a fucking joke?”

  Pablo curled up a little.

  “Easy, Doc,” Roy said, patting the boy on the back. “It’s OK, Pablo, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “No you didn’t,” Yu-jin agreed, shooting The Doctor a look.

  The Doctor cocked his head and studied her. “Wait. You knew about this.”

  “I promised him I wouldn’t tell,” she replied.

  The Doctor raised his hands in exasperation. “What the hell! This is an essential piece of tech, not some toy!”

  “It’s mine! Captain Wang gave it to me!” Pablo shouted.
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  For a moment the room fell silent. The Doctor visibly worked to get himself under control, and then said, “OK. First thing’s first. You said the ship is in trouble? What kind of trouble?”

  “Some kind of engine trouble. Something broke and they needed to weld it but their welder broke too. They gave me a list of stuff they need. I wrote it all down.”

  Pablo pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. The Doctor snatched it out of his hand.

  “How far out to sea are they?” he asked, reading through the list.

  “Not too far. They said you could make it in the motorboat. They gave me the coordinates. They’re written down there.”

  The Doctor nodded. “OK. We’ll help, of course. You did a good job, kid. Your mother will be proud of you. Where’s the radio?”

  Silence.

  “Pablo, where’s the radio?”

  “It’s mine,” Pablo mumbled.

  The Doctor rubbed his temple and grumbled something.

  Roy cut in. “Nobody’s saying it isn’t yours, buddy. It’s just that we need to talk to them.”

  “I have it hidden. I don’t want anyone to take it,” Pablo said, looking at his feet.

  Yu-jin leaned over the boy. “No one’s going to—”

  “Enough already!” The Doctor snapped. “The freighter is foundering out to sea and we’re talking about who owns what? Just get the damn radio so we can talk to them!”

  Pablo trembled. Roy frowned at The Doctor. His anger was hard enough for an adult to take, and a kid should never be subjected to it. Roy felt like giving the guy a piece of his mind. Hell, he’d felt like that every day for the past forty years, but he had never managed to do it.

  “It’s OK, Doc,” he said instead, hating himself for the conciliatory tone he put into the words. “We’ll go get the radio.”

  Pablo shook his head.

  “No, I’ll get it myself,” he said in a tiny voice.

  The Doctor took a sharp intake of breath. Yu-jin put a hand on the mayor’s shoulder.

  “Relax,” she said in a firm voice that would be better suited for bossing around Pablo. “He’s going to get the radio. Everything will be all right.”

  The Doctor let out a hiss of air between his teeth, then nodded.

  Damn, how does she do that?

  “I’ll walk you out,” Roy said to the boy.

  Pablo headed out of town to the north and came back in less than an hour, carrying a metal case under his arm and a sandy bag that he had obviously buried the radio in. Roy took him back inside New City. It took some sharp words with the guards at the gate to let Pablo through without searching the case. The boy clutched it like a mother with a newborn baby.

  The Doctor and Yu-jin met them on the roof where they could get better reception. Roy led Pablo up a narrow staircase to an open concrete roof bounded by a low wall. A rusty satellite dish, long dead, stood to one side. Otherwise there was nothing up there except bird droppings and a few spent shell casings fired during various sieges. Philip, New City’s head engineer, joined them a minute later. He was a skinny, nervous man with a receding hairline and thick glasses. Although too young to remember the city states, he was a whiz with anything technological. He was also Pablo’s teacher for three days a week in the electronics lab. Philip said he was a natural.

  Roy tousled Pablo’s hair as the boy looked around at the adults uncertainly.

  “OK, let’s see what you got,” Roy said.

  Shyly, Pablo put the case down on the concrete and opened it to reveal a gleaming radio painted in Chinese characters.

  “Wow, Pablo, you’ve been holding out on me. That’s a great radio!” Philip said.

  Philip’s apprentice grinned up at him. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  The Doctor nodded in appreciation. “Indeed it is. So what do you want in trade for it?”

  Pablo’s smile disappeared.

  “I don’t want to trade it.”

  The Doctor put on a smile and leaned over. “You’re a good kid, Pablo. You did a great job helping to stop Kent from blowing up the ship and you’ve been a big help with this too. Philip says you’re doing well as his apprentice. Says you’re a quick learner. Now surely such a smart young man as yourself would understand that the radio is too important to leave hidden out in the countryside somewhere. It should be here, protected, so we can—”

  “It’s not for trade,” Pablo repeated. Roy’s eyebrows went up to hear the iron in his voice. That little trip through the wildlands had changed the boy. Made him more adult. More like his kickass mother.

  “I’ll give you a good deal,” The Doctor went on. “Anything you want. Well, anything I can get for you.”

  Pablo shook his head.

  “Are you worried you won’t get to use it? I know your friend is on that ship. I’ll let you come up any time and use it all you want.”

  Pablo sulked. “No.”

  “Why not?” The Doctor asked, exasperated.

  “You’ll just mess it up,” Pablo mumbled, looking at his feet.

  “No, I’ll take very good care of it. It would be Philip or Kevin or Rachel using it anyway, not me. And you know how careful they are.”

  Pablo was looking at his feet and frowning. “That’s not what I mean. You’ll use it for bad stuff.”

  The Doctor looked confused. “Bad stuff?”

  “Grownups always mess things up. That’s why the world is all poisonous and gross.”

  The Doctor snorted and shook his head. Yu-jin giggled.

  “He’s got you there, Reginald,” she said.

  Pablo looked confused. “Who’s Reginald?”

  The Doctor scowled. “Never mind. Just turn that thing on and let’s talk to them. They’re in trouble. Can we focus on that, please?”

  Pablo reached down and twisted a knob.

  “What did you just do?” The Doctor asked.

  “He changed the tuning,” Philip said.

  “Only I know the right frequency,” Pablo said.

  The Doctor turned red. Pablo took a step back. “Do you want me to tell your mother how you’re behaving?”

  Pablo hesitated a moment, then replied, “I speak to the ship. Only me.”

  Roy looked from the little boy who had faced a lynch mob and tweakers to save his Chinese friend, and to the man who had founded a city out of chaos and had made it work for forty years. He realized the two were locked in a battle of wills.

  And damn, he didn’t know who would win.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Song Yu-jin hid behind a boulder about thirty kilometers north of New City territory, watching some distant figures creep through a thicket beyond a stretch of open ground. She had been playing cat and mouse with this group for the past couple of hours. They were a patrol from Weissberg, making sure no one encroached on their territory.

  Which was exactly what she and Clyde’s group were doing.

  She could hear Clyde Devon hunkering down with a few of his guards some meters away.

  “If this gets to shooting,” he whispered, “make sure she doesn’t get hit. The Doctor will have our heads if anything happens to that bitch.”

  “That bitch can hear you,” she growled.

  “Ah, fuck.”

  Yu-jin shook her head. How this buffoon had managed to protect New City for all these years was something she was sure she’d never know.

  The idea had been to get within sight of Weissberg so she could confirm what Clyde’s faction claimed—that the breakaway town had traded with the Chinese freighter. Yu-jin felt this was mostly a waste of time. She believed Clyde, because it made sense that Captain Wang would trade with them and that Abraham Weissman would have something to trade. He had been the richest man in New City, after all. But Clyde wanted to prove himself to The Doctor, not realizing that he would never be good enough in Reginald’s eyes. She had the feeling that dynamic had been going on for a long time.

  Doing this might build a bit of trust, at least. The fact that Clyde hadn’t sho
t her in the back must be worth something.

  Movement in a nearby thicket caught her eye. A figure—no, two—were creeping through some bushes about a hundred meters to their left. The ground was broken there, and Yu-jin immediately saw that pretty soon they’d be behind a low depression and out of sight. The way the ground looked, they might even be able to get directly behind her and Clyde’s group.

  “Psst.” She gestured towards the nearest guard. He frowned at her and put a finger to his lips. Yu-jin pointed to the left flank, then held up two fingers.

  Understanding dawned on the man’s face. He had a whispered conversation with the man beside him.

  Not waiting for them, Yu-jin readied her bow and crawled to the left. For a moment she lost the two Weissberg men, and then spotted them hunkered down behind a thick bush. She kept low, but her position was more exposed than theirs and they could probably see her.

  Damn, now what?

  A sound behind her made her turn. Clyde and a couple of his guards crawled up. She pointed to the bush. Clyde checked, focused, and nodded. He was all business now.

  He raised his M-16. Yu-jin put a hand on the barrel and shook her head. The Head of the Watch glowered at her until she leaned close to his ear and whispered, “Let me give them a warning shot unless you want to start a war.”

  “They already have,” he whispered back.

  “Reginald didn’t say you could start a fight.”

  “The Doctor doesn’t get to make that decision.”

  “Neither do you.”

  Yu-jin turned and fired her bow, sending the arrow into a rill of earth not far from the two hidden men.

  “Next one hits unless you’d prefer talking,” Yu-jin shouted.

  Yu-jin got on her belly in case the response wasn’t to her liking.

  It wasn’t.

  A burst of semiautomatic fire snipped off the branches of the bush just above her head.

  “Next one hits unless you’d prefer surrendering,” one of the Weissberg men called out.

  “Not a chance!” Clyde shouted.

  “You’ve brought an armed group into our territory without permission,” came the reply. “That’s a hostile act. Surrender now and you won’t be harmed.”

  “We don’t want to fight. We’re just checking out how you’re doing,” Yu-jin shouted.