The Pillar of Autumn

The ship we took refuge on was a "battle cruiser," Mom said, called the Pillar of Autumn. It was dozens of times larger than the little ship we had ridden in on, and it seemed to span for miles without end. My family hid out in the air ventilation system in an off-side passage where we were out of the main draft current. Mom had lined it with scraps of soft material she had collected during her daily outings to find us food scraps from what she called the "mess hall."

The vents were dim and dull. They were gray on all sides and in every passage. They twisted and turned in every direction; Mom had created a scent-path for us to follow so we didn't fall down an unexpected drop in the passages. She kept us away from the grates in the sides and bottoms for fear that we might be seen by unwanted "humans," as she called the strange straight-standing creatures. I thought it was ridiculous, since the older human in gray had already seen us when we boarded the little ship back in the yard. But Mom insisted that we stay out of sight, and so we did.

My siblings and I spent our days play-fighting and rough-housing in the dim passages of the air vents. I stayed away from a good number of these fake fights. I was the smallest in my litter, and usually the first one to get hurt. Badger was the biggest in the litter, and he used his size against the rest of us, so he didn't get as hurt.

Mom happily encouraged our play-fighting. I think she wanted to keep us busy while she was out scavenging so we didn't get into trouble. But her absences only gave me the chance to get a glimpse at the activity that was going on right under our paws.

The humans were strange creatures. I couldn't understand a word they said, and I couldn't wrap my head around their physical gestures. From what I could grasp, they bared their teeth when they were happy. I didn't understand. Cats only showed their teeth when they were irritated or angry. Why were they showing their teeth to each other if they weren't angry? It made no sense to me.

I noticed the more I watched them that they all responded in the same way to a man wearing gray. He was the same man we had encountered back on Reach in the ship yard; the one who let us onto the little ship Allvin had called a "Pelican." As far as I knew, this man was the oldest on the ship. I guessed that the rest maybe went to him for advice and guidance. He had all this strange little decorations stuck on his shirt and the other humans treated him with respect. He must be the leader, I decided, like Allvin. Allvin had said that he had his own group of cats to worry about. Maybe this man was the same way; he had his own humans to worry about like Allvin had his cats. I didn't think that was an unreasonable assumption, after all, the humans were living in a group. How could they not have someone to give them direction?

In a strange way the man reminded me of Allvin. He cared about his people, like Allvin cared about my family and his own group of cats. Even though I had only known Allvin for a short period of time, I felt like there was some fatherly feeling toward us from him. I got that same feeling from the ship's leader, though I didn't know him at all.

I thought it was funny that I could find some similarities between the humans and the few cats I knew. I wanted to tell Mom about it one night when she got back from raiding the scraps of the mess hall, but I knew she wouldn't like the idea. She was funny when it came to humans.

I didn't understand why she wouldn't just bring us down and let us live with the humans. After all, we were so close to them already I thought it just made sense. But Mom wanted nothing to do with them, and kept us holed up in the vents.

"The humans are dangerous," she said one night while we ate. "They can kill you instantly if they wanted to." We didn't know what "kill" meant, but it sounded bad.

Lark swiped her tongue around her mouth. "But why?"

Mom sighed and shook her head. "I don't know. Humans are strange creatures."

I said nothing, only continued eating. I doubted that. After all, I'd seen the way the human leader treated his men; I didn't think he'd let them hurt us, not even if they wanted to. But I let my mother and siblings be skeptical. Let them be afraid, I thought. It just gave me more of a reason to figure the humans out for myself.

I was still awake later that night, when the rest of my family had fallen asleep. My three older siblings were curled up in a heap, almost on top of each other. My mother was splayed out on her side, yet somehow managed to stay curled around the pile of soft stuff we slept on. I was fidgety, I wanted to get out and walk and explore the ship and the vents. I wanted to see what lay beyond our shallow lives of fear and secrecy. I wasn't afraid, not like Lark and Mom. Let them be cowards. It just showed who the brave cats were.

I stretched in my spot of the pile and settled down. No one stirred. I stretched again, this time getting to my paws, and hobbled out of the fabric pile. I sat at the edge of our hollow and looked around. The vents looked even darker than usual. They normally shine a bright gray, but with the lights off in the deck below, they shone a darker gray, like Badger's fur. In fact, I noticed that if I looked at the panels a certain way, they looked Badger's striped pelt, black and one thick white stripe down his back from his forehead.

I only snorted. I was tired of seeing the same old thing, even at night. I wanted to see something new. I stood up and took a few steps away from the hollow. I stopped and looked over my shoulder, just to make sure everyone was still asleep. Satisfied that they were, I took a right away from the hollow and headed off at a brisk pace to the furthest grate I could find.

It happened to be the first grate I found that was far enough away from the hollow. And, as a bonus, it just so happened to be right above the main deck of the ship. From where I sat, I could see the leader, carefully looking over a set of lines and shapes that meant nothing to me. Next to him, on a round solid object that looked like a rounded vent tunnel, was a smaller, odd-looking human I had seen only once or twice before. She—as far as I knew there were no other females on the ship, and the only females I did know were my sister and mother—was only about as tall as the tips of Mom's ears. She was a color I had no name for. She wasn't blue, like Badger's eyes, or red, like my fur. She was somewhere in between, but I didn't know that color. If I spoke Human, I'd ask her about her color, but my vocal cords were limited in the sounds I could make.

The oddest thing about her was that I could see the floor on the other side of her. It was like looking through a grate, only it was tinged that funny blue-red color. She came and went too, in a flash of blue light. One minute she was next to the leader, the next she was gone. Sometimes she came back, but most of the time she stayed away. I don't know where she went, but I wondered if she had a little vent hollow of her own that she stayed in when she wasn't with the leader.

I sat there watching as the leader talked to his see-through friend. He took this curved object out of his pocket and chewed on it. He did that a lot, and I wondered why. I didn't think he could eat it; it looked like the roots that had crawled into our den back on Reach. My family never ate the roots; Mom said they tasted bitter and they wouldn't help us fill our bellies. But he chewed on it anyway, whatever it was.

They made a lot of sounds I couldn't understand. The sounds almost sounded like cats noises, only they made no sense to my ears and I could hear them from where I sat. Still, I was happy to sit by the grate and listen to their funny noises. They were so much more interesting than my own kind.

I took my eyes off them for a moment and swept my eyes around the vent system that ran along the ceiling. I spotted an opened grate on the other side.

Good, I thought. I could get a better view of the leader and his friend. I stood and trotted through the gray maze to the open grate. If it hadn't been for the yellow light that streamed into the gray vents, I'm not sure I would have found it.

The opening gave me a better view of the main area, now that there weren't any bars in my way. I could see other humans sitting in cups at black fields with colored lines on them, like the ones the leader was looking at. I thought they might have been the same lines, but I couldn't be sure.

I heard the leader sigh. It was a tired sigh, like the ones Mom always made when she was fed up with my and my siblings' energy. I wondered if all the fighting had made him tired, after all, there had been a lot of that going on back on Reach. As far as I knew he hadn't been involved, but I couldn't say for sure.

I felt bad for him. Couldn't he just go home and leave all the fighting to everyone else? Maybe he had a family he had to get back to? Surely he must have wanted to be there instead of fighting those strange hunched creatures, right? I let out a sigh of my own and leaned forward a little to get a bit of a better look.

For a moment I thought I must have gotten a really good view, because the floor was becoming clearer and bigger. But then it sparked in my head that I had somehow tumbled off the edge of the grate, and I was falling to the floor in a ship infested with humans.

~O~

Reef jerked awake. Every night since she had first brought her family onto the cruiser she had had dreams of falling into endless darkness. She always woke feeling like she was only inches from the floor and it was only the waking world that caught her and set her down gently.

She took a deep breath to calm her nerves. It was only a dream, she reminded herself. You were never falling. You never have fallen, not like that. She took another breath and relaxed. Sometimes a little self-reassurance and a look around at your surroundings was all it took to calm down.

She rolled half way onto her stomach. She checked over the nest. Badger, Wasp, and Lark were sleeping a heap of gray, yellow, and white fur. She wished Flame would sleep in that bundle with them, but Reef's youngest kit always chose to sleep on the outskirts of it. Now, though, as Reef looked over her litter, she realized Flame was nowhere to be found.

Her heart thudded in her chest. Where could my youngest have gone? She knew her kit was adventurous and bold, she could see it in Flame's eyes. A mother's intuition told her Flame had been watching the humans from the grate since the first day they arrived on the Autumn. She had always known in her heart, but she never bothered to address it. She felt panic rising in her stomach. She couldn't let Flame end up with the humans, she couldn't. She knew from experience what would happen once Flame formed a close bond, if at all.

Reef slowly stood, so as to not wake the rest of her litter. She took a sample of the air. Her kit's scent was fresh, but fading. She followed the trail to the edge of the hollow, and took a right, following Flame's scent. It grew strong at the first grate she came to. She was about to move on when she spotted a small group of humans standing around in a cramped circle. One of them, a human dressed in red and white, was kneeling on the ground. Reef strained to hear the conversation, but only caught snippets of it.

"…didn't see anything, Captain…"

"…where did she…"

"…thought I detected something in our systems…"

Reef bolted for the open grate on the other side. Flame's scent trail led all the way there and then ran cold. Reef crouched at the edge of the opening. A hairball of terror formed in her throat.

Her youngest kit was lying in a crumpled heap on the floor, surrounded by a posse of humans, including the Captain. Nothing on Flame looked broken, but the kit was unresponsive. The fall had knocked her unconscious. She was breathing.

Reef inhaled sharply. This couldn't be happening. She had promised herself she would keep her litter safe, keep the family together. How could she have let this happen? She should have watched Flame, she should have told her again and again to stay away from the grates, from the humans, not just once. Where had she gone wrong?

As the kneeling human removed his jacket and scooped Flame up, Reef knew there was nothing she could do to recover her daughter. Part of her wanted to leap down and fight for her kit, but the other part knew that only the humans could help Flame if she was injured. From there…Reef hated to imagine it.

"Lieutenant Miles, could you please take this kitten to the infirmary?" the Captain asked.

"Yes sir," the lieutenant, the one cradling Flame, answered.

The Captain nodded as the officer went off. He turned to the AI stationed at the pedestal behind him. "Cortana," he said, "I know there are far more pressing matters that need attention, but could you make sure this kitten recovers?"

"Of course, sir," Cortana said. "I'll take care of the kitten and the Covenant." She disappeared in a flash of blue light.

Reef backed away from the grate, shivering. She'd heard enough and there was nothing she could do.