Around noon the next day Sam led another small deputation up to Warlord Hu’s fortified house.  This time, they were encumbered by a box.  Dropping it several times over the course of the trip up the hill elicited a few sotto voce comments on the ancestry and personal habits of the furs carrying it.
        “So, Captain, you come before me again,” Hu said as the group was ushered in.
        “Yes, Colonel,” and the badger gestured at the box.  “With a gift.”
        The wolf’s eyes narrowed.  “It is customary to give gifts at the first meeting, not the second.”
        “The gift did not arrive until late.”  She waved at two furs, who wrenched the lid off the box.
        Revealed in the box was a demurely veiled vixen wearing layer upon layer of diaphanous silks that simultaneously hid and revealed her figure.  Her musk caused two canines in the group to start wagging their tails, a fact that wasn’t lost on the warlord.
        His own tail wagging slightly, Hu said, “A very worthy gift.”
        “She cost a great deal, both in her upbringing and education,” Sam explained.  “We had a feeling that such a gift might be necessary.”
        “Nevertheless, she is not worth your engine.”
        “Of course not.  We are attempting to acquire another one as we speak.  She is merely a gift.”
        “I see.  Come here, girl.”  The vixen stepped forward daintily, and the wolf seized one of her paws and drew her closer.  His paws traced her outline through the silks, his smile growing wider and more appreciative as he brushed against a ticklish spot and the vulpine murred and squirmed.  “What is her name?” he asked Sam.
        “Does that matter?  Names can be so easily changed.”
        Hu grinned.  “Indeed.”  His paw quested lower, then up the vixen’s skirt.  Higher, higher, and he suddenly froze, his smile faltering as he looked up at the fox.
        “I know what you’re thinking,” Max said.  “’Is that a knife, or is she just glad to see me?’”  He drew a knife from a sleeve and pressed the point up under Hu’s jaw.  “Uh-uh, don’t say anything, Lover Boy.  I want to remember you just as you are.  Sam?”
        “Yes?”
        “Could we make this fast?  This stuff’s starting to itch.”
        “You didn’t have any objection to it last night.”
        “Well, it’s that thing you do with your paws – “
        “Later.  Colonel Hu, we’ll be taking our engine and generator.  Now we can either do it quietly and neatly, or we can do it with your blood all over my husband’s paws.  Your choice.”
        “Your – husband?” Hu cocked an eye at the Catalina fox, who grinned and winked at him.  “I suppose I have little choice.  Could you summon my aide, Captain Vreeland?”
        “Of course, Colonel Hu.”

        Shutting off and stripping down the engine and generator took nearly an hour, but eventually it was loaded onto a cart.  Sam watched as it was towed through the gate by her crew, then turned to Max.  “I’ll have the dinner waiting for you.”
        “Don’t hold it on my account,” her husband said, and after she was safely gone he prodded Hu with the knife.  Guiding him into a chair he waited until the wolf was sitting down before sitting in the astonished man’s lap. 
        “Are you not leaving with her?”
        “Sure.  But I figured we could get to know each other a bit first.  After all, I’m a gift for you,” and the tod chuckled.
        Nearly half an hour of lame jokes and innuendo-laced small talk later Max glanced at the desk clock.  “That looks like enough time.  Colonel Hu my boy, I’d love to say it’s been fun, but that would be a horrid lie.”
        The wolf’s eyes flashed darkly.  “If I get my paws on you – “
        “You already have, Lover Boy.  And I have to say I’m very disappointed.”  With that, Max kissed the wolf full on the mouth, then sprang from his lap and dashed out the door as fast as he could.
        Hu spluttered, spitting on his desk before drawing the back of his paw across his muzzle.  He bolted from the room and shouted, “After him!”

        The crew was making good time getting the parts of the engine below.  Hatches were gaping open and Lefty was busy reassembling it. 
        Heads turned at a shout, and crewmembers started laughing as Max screamed, “Hey!  Wait for Baby!” and was seen pelting down the road in a cloud of silks.  Ears went back as a shot rang out.
        Max half-twisted as he ran, firing a pistol.  Sam raised a brow. 
        Her husband hadn’t been armed with a gun when they had hatched this plan. 
        “General Quarters, everyone,” Sam said calmly, and furs scrambled to get the boat ready, casting off lines.  She touched the bridge intercom.  “Engine room.”
        “Go ahead, Sam.”
        “How much longer, Lefty?”
        “I can give you number one; two’s still scattered all over the deck.”
        “Very well.  Best speed at my order.”
        “Gotcha.”
        She switched the intercom.  “Jude,” the badger said, “remember to compensate for the loss of engine two.  Prepare to make best speed on present course.”
        “Yes, ma’am,” the helmsfur said.
        “All ashore that’s going ashore!” the badger shouted as another shot rang out and the bullet ricocheted off the periscope shaft.  “Lookouts below.”
        The two ratings descended, but paused as they watched Max, multicolored silks streaming behind him like flags, run the length of the dock and leap completely over the sub’s fantail, landing smack in the waters of the harbor.
        The fox surfaced, shaking water from his fur as several of the crew applauded.  “Max, will you stop clowning around and get aboard?  And someone take care of that,” she said as another shot rang out.
        The sub answered the rifle fire with a round from her forward deck gun, the 88-millimeter projectile exploding well in front of the warlord’s guards.  Not being similarly equipped, the furs retreated in disorder back over the hill as the diesel engine started and the submarine started to move.
        “Bridge, Engine Room,” the intercom rasped.
        “Bridge,” Sam replied as she saw Max being hauled aboard.
        “I can give you five knots.”
        “Five?”
        “That’s all I want to do until I get this other one assembled and synched.  You don’t want two bum motors, now do you?”
        Sam frowned.  “No, I don’t, so let’s think happy thoughts and hope Hu doesn’t have any artillery.”  She switched off the intercom and watched as the harbor started to (too slowly) recede behind them.
        Max, still dripping, climbed up the ladder to the bridge and Sam asked, “Where’d you get the gun?  Lift it off the Colonel?”
        “Nah, had it with me all the time.”
        “All the time?  Where did you hide it?”
        “None of your damn business, Sam.”


        Away from the harbor but still within sight of land the submarine, engine stopped, drifted and rolled in the swells as the crew waited.  Sam drummed her fingers on the bridge rail, then went below.
        She was met by a feline whose charcoal gray fur and dark blue coveralls were smeared and grimed with oil and grease.  The stump of his left wrist bore a wrench.  “Lefty,” Sam asked, “how’s it going?”
        “Well, we’ve about got it ready.  Care to see if she’ll start up or not?”
        “Sure.  Max!”
        “What?” the fox demanded, coming around from behind her.  She jumped as he pinched her.
        “You’re the Number Two here, so give us a prayer.”
        “Do I have to?  You know I’m no good at it.”
        “You sounded pretty heartfelt about it last night.”
        “Like I say, it’s just that thing you do with your paws – “
        “Skip it.”  She whispered in his ear.
        Max’s ears stood up straight and he raised his paws, chanting in clear but accented Tlingit.  When he was done, he nodded to Lefty.
        “Okay.  Fuel’s good, we’re ready.”  To an assistant he said, “Push the button, Frank.”
        “I will,” the bear said as he brushed a spit curl of headfur from his eyes.  “I will push the button,” and he hit the engine’s ignition switch.
        The six-cylinder MAN diesel sputtered, turned over, caught, and was soon rumbling like a contented dragon.  The other engine started just as easily, and barely skipped a beat as Lefty cut in the generators to charge the submarine’s batteries.
        There was nothing to say.
        Everyone cheered.


        As the sun started to go down there was enough battery power to enable the sub to submerge.  Once they were underwater, all seals and bulkheads were checked to make sure that the boat would stay watertight, and with the inspection complete it resurfaced.
        In the control room, Sam looked at the assembled furs in front of her.  In accordance with how things were done aboard smaller vessels in the RINS, the boat’s crew voted on their officers, with Sam being elected captain by acclamation.  Max was made Executive Officer, and the crew then voted on their petty officers
        When the process was over, Sam led the boat’s leaders over to the chart table.  “Okay, guys, we’re here,” and she tapped at a penciled mark.  “Our destination is way up here.”
        “May be a bit short of fuel by the time we get there, Sam,” Lefty said.  “Hu took more than half of it.”
        “True, and you all know what that means.”
        Max’s eyes gleamed and he started to sing:
“With catlike tread
Upon our way we steal,
In silence dread
Our cautious path reveal;
No sound at all
We dare not speak a word;
A fly’s foot-fall
Would be distinctly heard.”
        Many of the crew had joined in before he finished the second line.         
“Come, friends, who plough the sea,
Truce to navigation;
Take another station;
Let's vary piracee
With a little burglaree!”
        Sam waved for quiet before things got out of paw.  “Avast there!” she shouted in a passably piratical growl, which gained a laugh if nothing else.  “Okay.  We run on the surface until we find a likely target.”


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