“Oh, such confidence you have in me. I am so stoked.” Even being sarcastic, Frank’s dad sounded gentle and reasonable. It wasn’t fair. “Frank, I told you—I am of-fi-cially the medical and scientific attaché.” Tom Stone tucked his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, puffed out his chest and sat up straight in mock pride. “The Venetians asked us to send them some medical advisers. Which they certainly need. As you may remember—or maybe not, if you weren’t paying attention—Venice just got hit by a terrible plague a couple of years ago.”
“Ah.” Frank wondered when he would get to either say something meaningful or just get the hell out of there. Beside him, he realized, Aidan might be feigning cool but his spine was creaking with the effort of sitting at attention without looking like he was doing so.
“So,” his dad said, “do you want to come? We’ll be there maybe a year. I thought we’d all go, Magda and your brothers. The basic processes are working at the factory, now, and Magda’s dad can run the business side for the time being. Better than I can, to be truthful.”
Frank nodded. “Cool. Uh, that is, that would be just fine, Dad.”
“Great.” His father grinned brightly. “Maybe you and Aidan want to go find another spot? If you’re uncomfortable around authority figures and all? From here on in it’s shipbuilding, drains and commercial links, I’m afraid.”
Frank and Aidan got while the getting was good.
Chapter 8
The steam crane made things easier, of that there was no doubt.
When the bastard thing was working, that was. Yard Foreman Conrad Ursinus stared at the machine and tried, under his breath, threatening it. The verdammte thing was squirting steam in all directions and held a mid-rib in the air like a hooked fish where it was no good to man nor beast.
Threatening it did no good, alas. Conrad took a deep breath and drew on an English curse word or two. Somehow they seemed—filthier? Stronger? More satisfying. Earthier somehow. He certainly felt better for wishing that the stinking thing get fucked. Sideways.
That attended to, he cupped his hands and hollered over the screech of the safety valve. “Was fur shit ist es now? Ist broke, oder was?”
Aloysius the crane-driver leaned out of the cab, his fat Frieslander face sweating red while he wafted steam away from himself. “Das verfuckter packing noch immer. Funf minutes while es kuhlt, dan kann ich es fixen.”
That made Conrad chuckle. They had two new words: fucken, straight from English, and fixen, which meant to mend something, but sounded exactly like the word they used to use for fucken.
There was probably a scholar somewhere writing about it even now.
Conrad put his fingers in his mouth and whistled for a short break, and heard his gangers along the slip echo the call. There were benches down the side of the slipway, and he went for a sit-down while Aloysius broke out his toolbox.
The boat they were building, having only a contract number and not yet named, was to be a river craft. She could carry light and medium guns at need—everything they built at the U.S. Navy shipyard in Magdeburg had some military capability, even ships being built for civilian customers—but what she would mostly be was a means of hauling cargo along the Rhine and Elbe and whatever canals were built.
One of the very nice things Conrad had discovered about being in the U.S. Navy was that the shipyard had deliberately been planned by the admiral to have more capacity than he needed for his heavy warships. Which meant, especially given how many bottlenecks there were in the production of the ironclads he’d designed, that most of the shipyard was often twiddling its thumbs. “Twiddling thumbs” and “the Devil’s work” were pretty much synonyms so far as the admiral was concerned, so he’d eventually started cheerfully accepting the many civilian contracts that had been pressed upon him.
Then, when those contracts proved to be a significant source of income—American up-timers were given to obsessing over “moral issues” that no down-timer could make sense of—the admiral had decided that the civilian work needed to be handled by a separate official concern than the Navy itself. This, to avoid what he called “conflict of interest,” something which so far as Conrad could determine was the American equivalent of fussing over the precise status of the body of Christ during communion. So, with the agreement of Mike Stearns, the President of the U.S., Admiral Simpson had created the “U.S. Naval Shipyard Corporation.” The USNSC was technically a private corporation and not part of the Navy—even though all the employees and all the facilities did belong to the Navy.