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.
