It Means "Dragon To Be" Ch. 01

She derived a little satisfaction as she watched the GPS information update itself in the scope display. In seconds, the boat knew exactly where on Earth it was to an error of ten feet or less. The time and date were displayed, along with the air and water temperatures. Atmospheric humidity level came up next, followed by wind direction and strength.

A soft cheeping sound intruded on her thoughts to indicate that there was an incoming message over the intercom. Silke idled the Bluetooth for the moment.

"Why have you raised the scope?" Ginger asked through the temporarily hardwired connecting harness from the main building to the sub.

"Because," Silke replied dryly, "I felt like it."

"Can you see me waving from the window?"

Silke stopped and swung the scope back, looking over the windows of the building for a moment. She thought that she could see some motion from one of them, so she added a polarization filter to remove the glare and stepped up the magnification. Ginger came into view, waving to her.

"No," she lied more than a little uncharacteristically, "It's too sunny outside. Sorry, but I can't wave back. Who's there with you now?"

"Just the blokes in the rest of the room at the other end," Ginger replied, "Your father's gone to the board room. It looks like he's preparing a PowerPoint presentation for you for when you come up."

"I guessed that might happen," Silke said, "he must want to show me something and have the facts there to back it up. I'll be a little while yet. Will you have lunch with us?"

"Don't know if I can," Ginger said, "I might not be allowed to."

"Nonsense," Silke said, wanting to test a little, "Just make sure that you bat your lovely eyelashes at the right moment, and you'll be in. If there's one skirt that my father would love to chase, it's yours, Ginger. "

Silke chuckled as she heard Ginger's surprised laugh, "Not a bad idea – as a daydream. I'd be right set then, wouldn't I?"

"Oh, probably," Silke agreed, "but you'd better save your serious follow-up for some months from now at the earliest. I almost can't imagine working without you, my friend, but the second that you're involved with him, you're not my assistant anymore. I can't allow that, and you know it".

"Why?" Ginger's voice carried just a hint of an edge to it, "Since when is my personal life any of your business?"

"Since the second that you signed on and signed the confidentiality agreement. Since the second after you accepted the automatic bonus that was compensation for this aspect of your employment. Since the second that I gave you control over my itinerary," Silke snapped right back.

"Why am I finding myself going over old ground with you today, Ginger?" Silke asked, "This is not a new requirement for me, and you know that. It's not just a matter of my sensitivity here. Papa is a businessman, and for some things, even I don't trust him for a second. Sorry for your luck and sad to say, but, ..."

"Right," the clipped tones were back instantly, "I'll just gird my loins then, shall I? I'll prepare to repel all boarders."

"You know what I meant, Ginger," she said a little apologetically, "I meant no insult. This job is what will either make or break me for the rest of my life. Security is paramount for this project; even from my father. I determine what he can see with regard to the overall content and that's right in line with what I must report to the head of the board and no more. Given a chance, he'd want to know the grade of every bolt that I've specified – so that he can criticize.

He leaves all of the other division chiefs alone, never questions a thing with them, but I will always be subjected to so many unreasonable questions that I'd spend all of my time defending my choices. I'm the designer who has won awards, none of the others have, not even Papa. I'm the one with international recognition, not them. Yet I am always questioned, and only by him. He'll stop me and demand that my design be MILSPEC. Well, I've already specified beyond that. It wastes my time and then he says, "Oh, very well then, carry on," And then he fires off his next flurry of questions. I can't work like that. I'm only asking you to steer clear of him until the first boat is – "

"I hate to be pointed about it, Boss, but you're sitting in the first boat at the moment. I'm looking at your periscope, aren't I? It's in the water and everything."

Not that Ginger could see it, but Silke rolled her eyes, "This is the final working prototype that I'm in. Once the first production boat is sold and delivered to a buyer, I don't care what you do – and in the meantime, I'm paying you a mountainous salary as some compensation for the hardships of the job, aren't I? You agreed to that as a job requirement as did I. You earn more than I do. I know that it's been three years, Ginger, and neither of us is getting any younger for all the work that this has been. But we're almost there, and I'd really prefer that we stay the course for another reason. I think the world of you. You know that. I'd much rather that we conclude our agreement and then if you find that my father is as truly smitten with you as he appears to be, you can do as you will."

"Ah," Ginger replied, "so you're thinking that he'd only be interested in me to get information about the project that he might not get in any other, more controlled and filtered ways. Thanks for your heartfelt concern and trust."

"You're beautiful and you're brilliant," Silke said, "two qualities that he holds in high regard. I only wonder if he'd get his desires confused, and I'd rather not find out in the aftermath of anything sad, that's all, not this close to completion. Do you really fancy him?"

"You have no idea," Ginger replied, laying on the sarcasm, "He's handsome and powerful, two things which a girl like me finds irresistible. And of course, there's that other lubricant, almost guaranteed to pry a girl's knees apart, the best panty remover ever invented."

"You mean that he is wealthy?" Silke grinned, knowing that she'd hit a nerve that Ginger normally wouldn't ever show any sensitivity over. Now she wondered about that.

"Yes," Ginger laughed. "Ooh, I've just thought of something. If we hit it off and I manage to land him, why, I'd be your stepmother, wouldn't I? I can see it now. Think of-"

Silke was quick to interrupt, "I'd rather not, if it's all the same to you. He's my father and it's just a little unsettling to hear you speak like this, whether you're angry with me now or not. Do me a huge favor before we have lunch. I want a running crew waiting when I come up, and not a word to my father. If he asks, it's for debriefing. I'll call before I surface." Silke reactivated the Bluetooth connection.

"Tube load-out status," she said, in no mood to listen to her assistant's derision all of a sudden. She thought about the presentation that she was sure now that she didn't want to sit through as she climbed back down to the control room.

"Tubes one to four empty," came the reply.

"Flood tubes one to four," Silke said, "Monitor for seal leaks, monitor bilge level. Bilge pumps on standby."

The same soft cheeping sound was there in her ear as the system confirmed her commands.

"Why are you flooding tubes?" Ginger asked.

Silke sighed as she listened to the system as it confirmed that the tubes were flooded with sea water from the channel.

"Ginger," she said, trying to hold onto her temper, "must I ask and clear everything with you now? The purpose for all of this is to test for leaks, is it not?"

"Well yes, but –"

Silke could hear her assistant hesitate, and she even knew the reason for her question. The control room up in the offices had noted what she'd done. Though all of the staff there, Ginger included, knew that a tube leakage test was on the schedule, her father had questioned it. That was just one of the reasons that she hadn't wanted him to be here for this. But there was something else to it that made the woman on-board the submarine wonder.

She chuckled bitterly, wishing for a video feed from the control room now. She wanted to see her father's face. "I deeply regret two things today," she said, "I wish the schooner that Papa had built for himself was moored at the end of this channel – and for that reason, I'm sorry that I don't have at least one dummy torpedo to test. It would give me such satisfaction right now to knock a hole in the side of his dream for a change, so that he might know how it feels.

Tell Papa that it was scheduled, Ginger, and that there is nothing in any of the tubes, no swim-out research vehicles – not even any torpedoes, since we don't have any, BECAUSE THIS IS A SCIENTIFIC BOAT WHICH HAPPENS TO RETAIN TUBES IN ITS DESIGN TO SEND OUT PROBES!"

She drew a breath, "And please tell my father that if he wishes to question any more of the test schedule, then he can ask me himself."

Funny, she thought, that she could almost smell what her father had in mind for her project, and yet he balked at her leak-testing the tubes. She could already feel the first tingling tendrils of his micromanagement. He demanded the best from his own people – but he didn't micromanage them. Since she'd been a little girl, everything that she'd done had needed his personal stamp of approval. No matter how hard she'd worked to prove herself, no matter what honors others had heaped upon her for her designs, there was always this thing about their relationship.

Soon, he'd suggest that she use some of his hand-picked specialists, no doubt to review and look over what she'd done. She'd been here before.

Twice.

It was what had caused her to leave the business the first time. Her father had talked her back in with promises which he was now going to ignore. Funny how history repeats itself, she thought. Once a tiger, always a tiger.

Suddenly, she knew why Ginger had asked for the cameras to be installed. That edict must have originated from her father. It made her wonder what else he'd asked of her assistant.

Silke snorted angrily as she tossed a Styrofoam bowl of noodles into the microwave in the galley. She was so done with this.

When the mike was finished, she fished a plastic spoon out of her knapsack and headed for the control room.

Silke ordered the intercom system shut down and leaned forward to look at the screen which monitored for leakage. There was nothing.

Not bad, she thought, but she was only in a calm channel and not very deep at all. It might easily be a different story deeper down.

"Open outer doors." She said quietly.

After fifteen minutes of sitting on the bottom with four torpedo doors open and no apparent leakage, she ordered the doors closed and the tubes pumped out. She tossed the empty noodle cup, went back up into the tower and grabbed the periscope handles again. Walking the front of the scope around, she looked at the building windows again as she thought about the little nagging thing in her mind that she'd heard – or thought that she had – in her assistant's voice.

She was about to fold the handles and order the scope to be lowered when a slight motion in the windows of the floor above the control room caught her eye and she stepped up the magnification as her thumb nudged the button to begin recording the scope video feed. Silke's mouth opened slowly in amazement.

She wanted to do something as she took her eyes from the viewfinder. She found herself wanting to do any one of several things; burst into tears, throw up, rage and smash something, those being only a few of the items on the list. She ignored the tenderness of her bruised forehead and jammed her face against the scope's objective once more – just in case she was imagining this. But she knew that she wasn't.

There, very near the windows of the board room, her personal assistant had temporarily welded herself to her father. She watched as the pair worked their way backward in their passion so that Ginger's backside was against the edge of the boardroom table. A few moments later, Ginger's skirt was high up on her hips and her underwear was off as they began what appeared to Silke to be something that looked nothing at all like a professional relationship anymore.

To her eyes, it didn't even look as though they were fumbling at all. They were quite obviously used to doing this sort of thing often, since none of the uncertainty of a first pairing came to her notice.

"A PowerPoint presentation," she mused.

She watched for a time, certain that this was getting to the hard drives of the system. When it was quite obvious to her that they were at the critical moment, she waited for just a few seconds longer before she stopped recoding and slammed up the scope handles, ordering the scope retracted into its well.

Three years with Ginger as her personal assistant, Silke thought. She now wanted to slap her forehead as she thought of the year before that which Ginger had spent in working her way toward close friendship, earning Silke's trust. Silke wondered if she now ought to feel like a fool.

She supposed that it was already too late for that.

She thought about what her father was here to attempt as she went downstairs and walked to her knapsack for some blank discs. She began to feel the familiar detachment inside herself that she felt whenever she was about to cause someone an unpleasant surprise. She was a little surprised at herself as she thought that it felt no different if the other person was her own flesh and blood.

She reviewed the video to be certain that it would show what she wanted it to show before she saved it to her personal file on the boat's servers as well as her laptop. That done, she unplugged the laptop from the system and burned three copies to disc.

This was why her father had come early; to pat her little head and compliment her on the job that she was doing before he tried to sell her a bill of goods and subvert the direction of her project. The old tiger knew his cub very well. Here she was sitting in a box underwater while he was screwing her assistant, and when that was done, he'd no doubt be sitting in air conditioned comfort, sipping sparkling mineral water and smoking one of his cigars as he finalized his preparations for their discussions. But this was all timing and she knew it. She had her material ready.

The cub had claws of her own.

She just wondered if there was anything to what she'd seen. She knew that her father loved her, but couldn't keep his fingers out of the pie. Was Ginger brought in as a plant? What was her personal stake in this? Did she really believe that, ...

Silke shrugged. It didn't matter anyway.

She looked at the walls of the submarine around her. The original design might have been for a wartime purpose, but she'd made this version something that wasn't meant for that. She felt a little sad that she'd never get the chance to at least sail on the thing once.

Then again, she thought...

She activated the headset again. "Orders." She said, and the system responded that it was ready for commands. The first of those had been to surface just enough to keep the grating of the outer conning tower above water.

She ran up into the tower and waited for confirmation. When she heard it, Silke opened the hatch and stayed outside only long enough to disconnect the communication cables and toss them far enough away so that they fell into the water of the channel. She was back inside and dogging the hatch as she gave the command to submerge to twelve meters.

She had confirmation as soon as she was at the consoles again. She switched them over to navigation mode and by the time that the control room personnel realized that they'd lost communication with the test boat, Silke was motoring out of the channel into the main harbor, her periscope up enough to give her positional data and the radar showing her on screen what other shipping was out there, which way it was headed and at what speed. Anything that might represent the slightest possibility of being a collision hazard would cause visual and audible warnings.

The screen was all green.

She grinned, with the scope slaved to a joystick on the control panel, she didn't even need to be there with her eyes to the thing. She could watch it all from where she sat. It was the best video game in the world.

The second that her charts showed that she had the depth for it under her keel, Silke was there with her periscope down, headed for the North Sea.

She wasn't at it long, sadly. She'd have liked to be out here all day, but there was Hell to pay for even this and she knew it.

She'd just wanted to say goodbye to the greatest thing that she'd ever designed.

She ran rough tests for speed and projected battery life both submerged and surfaced, and then she switched over to the diesels for a little while and noted that the batteries were topping up their state of charge from it.

Finally, she turned around and began to make her way back. This time, she stayed on the surface. She switched the radios to the company channel and announced her arrival, running along dead slowly on the surface and then coasting the rest of the way. She switched the radios off right after announcing that she'd be up at the conclusion of the test period.

With the boat stopped in the middle of the narrow channel, she ordered a gentle descent to 13.3 meters and the boat settled onto the bottom again.

Three hours later, Leopold Kriechbaum stood on the quay, looking at the spot in the water where the intercom cables ran. From there, he looked out toward the center of the channel and waited in the sunshine, feeling a little droplet of his sweat run from his hairline down his handsome face. He was about to wipe it away with his handkerchief when he heard the voices over the radios of the company's dockhands as they acknowledged the warning that his daughter was on her way up.

Out in the channel, just the barest flat bulge of water could be seen to foretell that something was happening underneath the murky darkness, and then the top of the conning tower rose slowly out of the water.

Leopold smiled. He knew that Silke was bringing her lifelong dream into the sunshine very slowly and under full control for dramatic effect. As more of the coal-black seagoing dragon rose, he admired it again, his eyes going to details everywhere on the thing. At last, it stopped rising and sat there dripping quietly.

It was far different from the modern products that his firm produced today, and yet, this design had sired those ones – all of them. Though this iteration was only a few months old, built from modern materials and carrying the latest equipment not even dreamed of by its original designers, this beauty was a direct reincarnation of a Type XXI, the first Elektroboot.

Her lines were almost as majestic as the Type VII which had been the workhorse of the wolfpacks. The shape was not as modern and functional as the boats of today, but there was far more elegance to her anyway, and in every way, Silke had corrected the deficiencies to a point that even exceeded the new designs in some respects.

To a shipbuilder such as Leopold was, it didn't matter that the newer ones were made for military service while his daughter's work was intended for science. None of that mattered.

It was a thing of beauty and grace. Up to this design, submarines had really been surface ships which could dive for short periods. From this point onwards, they had become true underwater craft. Even the nuclear missile subs owed much to this stallion.

Even though he was furious, he thought of his lovely daughter with at least a little pride as his eyes slid from one end of her creation to the other. She'd corrected all of the structural weaknesses and chosen non-magnetic steel for the hull. Her purpose was to lessen the boat's impact on any underwater geomagnetic surveys, if that was what any customer desired to use the boat for. Well that was fine, he thought, it also made the thing a lot more difficult to find using magnetic anomaly detection methods.