It Means "Dragon To Be" Ch. 01

**This was meant to be a finite story, though I guess that it could be added to. I'm posting all of the chapters at once so that I can get back to some other tales. I just wanted to get this one story out since it's been bugging me for a while like a literary hangnail.

It's a little odd, but then ... ~shrug~

o_O

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Silke woke with a start and tried to sit up at the same instant. The maneuver would have worked well ordinarily. It was how she sometimes woke up from a dead sleep if she'd been up far too late the night before, puzzling and poring over pages and pages of testing data and calculations. After a night like that, and faced with a heavy schedule planned for the next day, World War III couldn't wake her as a rule, no matter how much she'd intended to get out of bed and get a move on.

But for some unknown reason, the comparatively quiet ring-tone of her cell phone could wake her from the sleep of the dead. It had saved her from sleeping through her day many times.

Today, it almost killed her.

Her eyes snapped open and she sat up instantly – slamming her forehead straight into the compressed air pipe which ran not all that far above her head. She saw the flash from the impact in her vision and fell right down again, flat onto her back with a groan before curling into a fetal position on the bunk.

"Scheisse!" she hissed in pain through her teeth.

Great. She now felt as though she'd left half of her brain on the pillow and bashed the rest of it out against the pipe.

And still the fucking phone rang.

She raised herself cautiously and swiveled around to sit on the edge of the bunk and look around at the empty bunks of the crew's quarters. She'd been here for the past fifty-three hours to run a few preliminary 'wet' tests on the bottom of the channel of the harbor at Kiel, Germany. For this, she'd allowed no volunteers. Since a guinea pig was required, she'd decided to do this herself. Feeling as though she could finally sleep near the end of the second day, she'd racked out in here.

She made a mental note that the pipe be padded and other things such as this searched for. For what she was going to be charging for these things, the least that she could do was to make certain that nobody killed themselves trying to sit up in their bunks.

Silke shook her head very carefully and tried to make some sense of it. She was alone in the first of her boats; on the bottom of a channel close to the pen that this hull had been towed to so that it could be fitted out after it had been launched weeks ago. If there was one place on Earth – one sanctuary where the curse of modern telecommunications could not reach her - it had to be here.

And yet, she heard her phone ring.

Since when could cell phone signals penetrate forty feet of water and the thick rubber-coated metal hide of a submarine? It wasn't possible.

So why was the damn thing ringing?

She searched through the pockets of her coveralls where she'd put them after taking them off the night before. Stuffing her fingers hurriedly into all of the pockets, she searched in vain for the offensive little device and cursed under her breath, swearing to God and any other deities who might be within earshot that once she'd felt her fingers close over the thing, she'd heave it as hard as she could against the wall.

It was time for an upgrade anyway.

But it wasn't there, and yet she could hear it ring. It dawned on her that the sound was coming to her ears from the cabin intercom and PA system.

"Fur dammt noch mal!" She yelled before switching to English, "Shut that thing off or there'll be hell to pay, I promise!"

It took a few seconds longer before the strident chirping ceased.

The cheerful voice of her assistant Ginger replaced the chirp, "Are you awake, Boss?"

Silke snorted as she cradled her still-pounding head, "Are you enjoying the last few minutes of your employment?"

"Time's long past up, and you weren't answering anything else. I had to do something, didn't I?" the clipped, professional and very British tones replied.

"Finally, I thought of your ring-tone, and I had the lads here pipe it in."

"Very ingenious – and also very cruel," Silke smirked. "You do know – as I keep telling you, that the war is over now for nearly seventy years, yes? I had nothing to do with it. I wasn't born until more than forty years after that," she said, as she saw her silicon dildo lying on the blanket of the bunk. Custom-made to the shape and dimensions of one particular man, she'd brought it along because it helped when she was feeling stressed and because she missed him so much.

These days, with the testing of her design set to begin, Silke was feeling stressed quite a lot and had little time for much in the way of the meditation which normally calmed her.

She wrapped it in the small towel that she'd brought and shoved in into her knapsack.

"Right," the voice agreed, "where the hell are you now? You're not on any of the monitors."

"I slept in a bunk in the crew's quarters. There are no cameras in here," she said as her feet hit the floor and she reached for her underwear, "I'm in the crew quarters. I'll be moving forward toward the captain's cabin in a minute. I need some ice from the refrigerator for the goose egg that I'm wearing on my forehead. I wasn't about to sleep in the captain's bed, since I know that you had a camera installed there for this test. There were none installed where I spent the night." She grabbed her coveralls and began to shuck them on.

"What's the big deal?" Ginger asked, "They were only put in to make sure that you were alright. It's a little much to expect the head of a company to be out of sight for two days and nights. Safety is a concern, Silke. We just wanted to –"

"We've been over this ground," Silke said, "You just wanted to capture me snoring the carpeting off the floor. I know you, Ginger. You'd love something like that. You'd torture me over it for years to come, probably release a few minutes at a time to put up on YouTube. You know that I snore terribly. I have enough to feel ashamed about. I won't provide you with footage of me with my mouth open and drooling while I cause any closed door in the area to bend back and forth from my snoring. Besides, it's not all that much of a concern. I just wanted some privacy while I was down here. You never know, I might have hidden a man away down here. Even you can't say that you've had a man in a submarine."

Ginger wanted to laugh, "That's true," she said, even though it wasn't. Long before she'd enlisted in the Royal Navy, she'd gotten laid in an old sub on display in the Submarine Museum one night as a teenager.

Silke looked around the compartment noting that it smelled like sex. She sighed to herself. If only that were true.

"What was that about a goose egg?" Ginger asked as Silke came into view on one of the monitors.

"When I woke up thinking that I was hearing the alarm on my phone, I sat up in a hurry and hit my head on a pipe," Silke said, as she pulled a tray of ice cubes from the fridge. She had a handful loose in seconds, laying them on a towel which she wrapped up and held to her forehead. "It's all your fault," she said.

But the retort which she expected never came, and knowing her assistant as well as she did, Silke made a simple deduction. "You're not alone now, are you?"

"I wasn't alone before, not really," Ginger smiled, "though it was private enough for our talk. Right now though, I've got your father here and he wants to talk with you, so I'll shove off for a while."

Silke nodded unconsciously as she wondered why her father would be here some three days ahead of time to meet with her. She didn't think that it boded well, whatever it was about. One thing that could be counted upon with respect to her father's personality was that issues were always met head-on if there was the time for it and in a pre-emptive manner if at all possible. She had planned for this test to be concluded long before he'd even arrived.

He'd pre-empted her again.

"Papa?" she said as she looked for a mirror, "What's happened to make you come so soon? We weren't scheduled to expect you for another few days." She cursed the lighting which had been set to a low level to conserve battery power for this test as she tried to get a good look at the lump on her head.

"I can see that, Hertzchen," the man replied, "Why are you performing a static leak check yourself? You couldn't hire anyone else to do this for you?"

Leopold Kriechbaum was every inch the modern day German industrialist, and these days, that meant that in order to survive, let alone succeed; one had to be fairly detached toward a lot of things while hanging on to the gist of whatever was up. He had no trouble asking the most pointed questions and the delays that he might hear before he got his answers told him as much or more than the carefully-worded replies a lot of the time.

But though he was a feared tiger in the boardroom, Leopold told himself that he loved his daughter more than anything. That boundless father's love was usually more than enough to buy his daughter a pass for quite a lot of her transgressions – not that there ever were all that many which needed forgiving. But she was the head of a rather large and expensive project, and the thought of a mishap and the cost, both to his heart and to his empire was just one of the things on his continually calculating mind at the moment.

"I am having a bit of trouble here," he said in a way that made Silke want to groan, since she could already see the approach that would be used. It was one which she hated, the gentle, self-effacing lead-in which always ended with a loud question. The fact that he wasn't artfully trying out several light feints in a few different ways made her want to search for some ear plugs.

"Perhaps I am just too old and slow to see the obvious and logical reasoning for why the head of one of our corporations, and leader of one of the most costly forward-looking ventures ever attempted by any division in our company's long history needs to hide herself inside a U-boat on the bottom of a channel for TWO DAYS! Have you lost your mind?"

Silke was already sitting at the engineering officer's console, stepping through the pages of automated status reports on the four screens in front of her from the system which was almost capable of running the boat by itself. So far, the only things which had changed were a very slight decrease in the available oxygen level along with the reasonable and corresponding increase in the carbon dioxide level. No surprise there, she reasoned, the ventilators were off and so were the scrubbers.

Switching screens, she noted a slight drop in the state of battery charge, and even less than she'd anticipated. She smirked, though she didn't look toward any of the cameras. "It has to be done, Papa," she said, "It wouldn't say a lot about my project or my convictions if I wasn't able to show any trust in my own designs. How are you for time? If it's important, I can have this sow on the surface in a few minutes."

"No," he said, "Complete what you were doing. We can talk like this, ja?"

Silke wanted to throw something. She knew why he wanted to continue now. She was locked up safely away from him so he could just drop his fiscal and financial bombs on her in relative comfort and safety. She looked down at the floor and drew a deep breath. "Very well, let's begin then."

They talked as he sat there with his briefcase open and his laptop out on the empty chair in front of him. His daughter listened and they discussed many points while she ran her tests in the channel outside and far below the sunny morning which was already growing warm. Now and then, she asked him to wait for a moment or two as she examined some detail, or ran a quick side-test as she consulted the hand-written test list in the small paper notebook that she'd carried in her overalls.

"In summation," he said, "your corporation is doing far better than passably well. It's quite remarkable, really, when one considers that it is really a working research arm. Almost all of those lose money faster than a fool in a whorehouse, yet you are set to return a very modest and quite unexpected profit this year even if you do not land one of the larger contracts."

He sat back and accepted a cup of coffee from Ginger with a smiling nod of thanks. "I see how you're managing to do it, with a few careful offerings of licensed technology for sale, but it is more than that. You run a very tight ship in a lean way. That's even more remarkable when one considers the length of the hair of many of the inmates in your zoo here, "he chuckled, "I can see that everyone here is quite busy and happy to be so."

"Danke Papa," she smiled, sensing just a hint of an opening. She had to be careful here, she knew. Her father was masterful at setting traps when he tested her. "I think they all realize just how fortunate they are to have dream jobs as they do in the current economic climate. They also trust me implicitly," she said," and one of the strongest reasons for that is that they know that I wouldn't accept anything less than perfection and as safe as it can be made to be – safe enough even so that the president of the corporation herself can sit in perfect safety on the floor of this channel.

Look around, Papa. I know that you'll see a lot of tired faces in the control rooms. Many of them haven't been home since I climbed in here and sank myself to the bottom for this test. I had a watch schedule drawn up, but nobody actually went home. They all stayed for this, sleeping the watch schedule in the lounges."

Leopold looked around. He could see that Silke was correct. It was remarkable the way that they all loved working for his daughter. He slurped his coffee and set the mug down, "Well you may have a point in your firm belief in this wonderland of maritime miracles that you have built yourself. I really can't poke too many holes in your purse over it, since it seems to be running so well.

But now we come to the rock in the road, Silke," he said, his voice taking on the edge of the hard-nosed businessman.

"As you know, our family's business has grown and traveled far from its humble beginnings as a little shipbuilding yard in the time of your great-grandfather. We are now not completely a private concern any longer. There are others who have quite a lot of their fortunes at stake. Where once I would have been able to ride roughshod over any opposition, I must now at least listen and hear the concerns of the other stakeholders. What I have heard lately is a bit of a two-pronged fork."

Silke brushed one of her long blonde bangs out of her eyes as she stepped through screen after screen of sensor data. "And what am I to be speared with now, Papa? We already have preliminary orders for a half-dozen boats. The deposits alone are worth many millions of Euros. The very first one that we land in two months will spring my division deep enough into the green to cause our bankers to have erections. When just one more comes after the first boat is only half-built, it would surely make them wet their silk handkerchiefs in joy and financial lust. What could they have to find fault with me over now?"

"Your main product is wondrous, Hertzchen," he smiled, "a scientific vessel which may be configured in so many ways to study everything from wildlife migration to oceanographic current testing to even measuring environmental impact in hundreds of ways, all while minimizing its own. But there are a few who have seen other uses. By the way, you ought to button up your overalls. The boys here can almost see your nipples in the camera on that console."

Silke's eyes blazed, recognizing that while what he'd said might be true, he was also trying – unsuccessfully - to throw her off her stride. She didn't even look down.

"I will not build submarines for military purposes," Silke warned. "Aren't we still living that down after all of these decades? You can call it whatever you like, from deterrence to monitoring to peacekeeping to covert operations platforms, I will not build them. We have a division which does that already, and I know that it returns a huge and handsome profit year after year, selling to navies all over the world.

All of my life, people look at me because of my name. "Ah yes," they say to me, "your family built a third of the U-boats in the war. Do you have any idea how that feels? Half of them wish to bow to me and the other half thinks that we had it easy during the restoration afterwards. And then there are those who think that I ought to be crucified for reasons that make no sense at all. All that I've gotten are the looks all of my life and in every engineering class at school. Oh look – it's U-Boat Girl! I wanted to strangle the reporter who came to interview me when she mentioned it.

So please don't pick on my dream, Papa. I'd walk away from it first. And as far as my nipples are concerned, let them all dream. The first one who says one word or performs a screen capture will be escorted out of the gate. If it wasn't for the cameras that Ginger insisted on, I just might be comfortable here and not sweating my ass off inside this polyester rag. I'm still pissed that I can't get cotton coveralls."

"I hear your concerns, Silke," he said, trying to sound conciliatory, "That wasn't what was meant. Yes, we make boats like that, but all of them are the latest and the best. And among the most expensive. What some of us see is another market emerging altogether, one which is most definitely not suited to our more usual sort of projects."

He smiled, "Finish up your testing programs. I'm not going anywhere. We can speak of this over lunch."

With the open intercom connection closed, Silke sat thinking for a minute as she saved all of the accumulated test data to both the system servers and her laptop and then she switched the control system to an active mode. She felt the ventilators start, and navigating to another set of screens, she turned on the hot water heater in the captain's cabin. She needed a shower at the very least, she thought as she wandered toward the rear of the control room, headed for the ladder to the conning tower.

She climbed up a little absently to emerge on the inside deck there. She glanced at the closed hatch which would lead to the open cupola on top of the boat. Since the boat was submerged now, going up there was obviously out of the question. She sighed, wanting now to be away from here and feeling the sea breeze in her hair.

She performed a little arithmetic as she adjusted her Bluetooth headset. Forty feet of channel depth, minus the eighteen feet from the bottom of the keel to the horizontal datum where the waterline would be if the boat were floating on the surface, minus another eighteen feet from there past the deck line and the height of the conning tower, minus the last of the forty feet and allowing a little for the tide. That would still leave her about five or six feet of periscope height at full extension. Plenty for a look around a dead calm channel.

"Voice Mode," she said.

There was an answering chime from the intercom system, one-half second before the speech chip activated for its response. Silke knew that the voice and speech recognition systems were already online, but she paused anyway.

"Authenticate," the voice said in her ear.

"Authentication code Kriechbaum golt, einz einz null einz," she said.

"Authentication recognized. Loading user profile. Do you require system status?"

"No. Up main scope," she said, and the silver column before her rose out of the floor with a soft whine. She grabbed one of the handles and unfolded it. The upward progression stopped instantly and she unfolded the other handle. As she brought her face toward the small LCD screen she hissed once from the sensation as the bump on her forehead made light contact with the padding on the scope. Silke walked around in a tight circle as she surveyed the scenery around her for a few moments while she thought. There was something wrong here, but she couldn't get a handle on it, other than some strange intuitive sense that she had.