MeMe sat on a purple gravity cushion at the rear of the cabin with her eyes fixed on the back of Mau’s head. As Mau moved his body to pilot the ship, he cringed in pain from the deep bites MeMe had inflicted on him when he’d tried to unfasten his diamond collar from her neck.

He turned around to look at MeMe. “We’re going up into space to see the little surprise I have waiting behind your Moon —”

“It’s no surprise,” she cut him off. “That’s where you have your army of metal cats that are going to kill all the people and take over the world.”

Mau grimaced. He never should have said anything to Sona.

“Ah, well, yes,” he stammered. “But first we’re going to make a brief stop at a spot known as Area 51, the most top-secret place on Earth.”

“Dreamland’s no secret.” MeMe sniffed. “That’s where they keep the old space ships when they crash on Earth. Everybody knows that.”

Are there no secrets? Mau grumbled to himself, festering in gloomy silence for another 1000 miles.

After a while, MeMe spoke up, “You’re looking for some old ship from the lost expedition that flew away.”

Mau snapped out of his brooding reverie. “How do you know that?”

MeMe gave him a sage look. “Everybody knows that. Neko read all about it from the picture writing under that big golden cat. Her name is Bast. Didn’t you notice it when you were there?”

Mau cut her off, angry with himself that he hadn’t bothered to translate the ancient writing.

“It’s not the ship I’m after, my little friend —”

“I’m not your little friend. You kidnapped me.”

Mau winced, trying to keep his temper. “It’s called a Pearl,” he explained through clenched teeth, hoping to get close enough this time to snare the catch so he could grab his collar. “Just a little thing about the size of a pea. But it contains more knowledge than all the libraries on your whole primitive planet. Do you like peas?” he asked with a sly grin. “Sometimes they put them in cat food.”

MeMe wasn’t too fond of peas in cat food, but she liked libraries. In her former life when she was so hungry she could have eaten orange peels, she’d passed the back door of a library and discovered food that kind people left for homeless cats. MeMe figured if she were ever lost again, the best place to eat would be at a library. But a library the size of a pea wouldn’t make much of a meal.

“Wouldn’t you like to know what a clever cat like me can do with something like that?” Mau boasted proudly.

“Like what?”

“Like...Oh, never mind.”

“No, tell me.”

“The Pearl contains lost secrets of my planet which will give me great power over the Emperor and his Cabinet.” Mau drew himself up proudly.

Thinking of a pun she’d read on one of Dilby Dunkle’s bubble gum wrappers, MeMe gave Mau an arch smile and said, “It won’t be easy for you to get any more of those pearls.”

Brooding darkly Mau bit his lip, wondering if this simple Earth cat might be a savant with prophetic abilities. If so, he’d need to keep her around, or her ghost would bring him bad luck.

At the moment, Mau was too busy to find out what she meant, as he concentrated on penetrating Edwards Air Force Base airspace undetected. Approaching from the north, he hugged the rough terrain well above Homey Airport, entering a high canyon south of a peak called Bald Mountain.

Hiding the saucer in a steep ravine, Mau turned to MeMe with his paw outstretched. “OK cat, give me my collar.”

“I’ll make a deal with you,” she said. “I know how to take it off by myself now. So let me outside and I’ll leave it on the ground for you to pick up after I run away.”

Mau shook his head, “You take me for a fool? I’ll never see you or my collar again. I’m not doing that.”

MeMe narrowed her eyes at Mau.

“I always keep my word — unlike some cats I know.”

Mau lunged at MeMe but she skipped around the curving wall. She had no idea how the collar worked, but remembering the way Khui had put his paw to it the night they got zapped, she reached up to touch the collar.

“No DON’T!” Mau cried in genuine alarm. “You’ll blow up the ship!”

Mau reluctantly opened the hatch so MeMe could escape out the door. True to her word, she threw the collar on the ground. Running away as fast as she could, she tripped over stones, tangled her fur in brush, pricked her skin with cactus thorns, but she managed to struggle up the gully to a hiding place in the rocks.

Frightened and lost, MeMe looked around at an unfamiliar landscape of sagebrush, clay, and rocky hills, wondering how she’d ever find her way home. From her high vantage point, she watched Mau pick up the collar. After looking around furtively, he ran down the hill toward a gravel road leading into the canyon below.

Too tired to run any farther, MeMe put her head down on her paws with a forlorn sigh. “I should have asked him what the Emperor of Alna keeps inside his cabinet,” she thought to herself, remembering all the delicious food Susan kept inside hers.

When she recalled the bubble gum wrapper, MeMe considered. “I was only going to tell him that oysters don’t give away their pearls because they’re a little shellfish, but maybe he wouldn’t have gotten it anyway.” Resting her head on a stone, MeMe thought about her friends back home. Her eyes grew heavy and she dozed off.

Mau hiked down the canyon road grousing to himself about how he’d wasted so much of his valuable time on all of those frightening Egyptian mummies. After the kitten Jeffery revealed information about Area 51, Mau had simply directed the ship’s antenna toward Nevada and keyed an ancient code, depreciated but still listed in the manuals. To his surprise, an echo came back from this very canyon. Angry with himself for overlooking the obvious, he chased his tail until he caught it in his teeth. Biting down hard, the pain helped him to forget his anger.

Creeping in the bright moonlight from shadow to shadow, Mau approached a group of board shacks that had been disguised to look like an abandoned mining camp. At the head of the ghost town lay a long concrete bunker built into the side of the hill that matched an image he’d downloaded from an Alna military satellite.

On the south side of the bunker, a dozen Air Force security guards took a break at their lonely post enjoying sandwiches and paper cups of coffee. Mau crossed to the north side, where he found a small casement window. Jumping up on the window sill, he deployed a green ray from his collar to turn the glass back into sand. Brushing it away with his paw, he hopped down inside to the floor of a small washroom.

As soon as Mau went out in the bunker’s hallway and saw the vast collection of bizarre objects, cold fingers of fear gripped his guts. He noticed immediately over the coating of desert dust covering the floor, the only recent footprints he could see were his own. Obviously those people outside were too terrified to venture in.

Stepping along the corridor, Mau took scant interest in the twisted panels, the dented nacelles, wings, fins, and the oddly-shaped seats that UFO buffs would be so thrilled to discover.

When he reached the open doorway to the long front room, Mau’s fur puffed out like a boiler brush. Haphazardly littering the floor were open cases of retrovirus aerosol bombs, proton mines to dissolve a planet’s iron core, cloud salters for generating tornadoes. There was even an old fashioned pendulum shaker for triggering earthquakes. In Mau’s military experience, there was enough death and destruction in this one corner of the room to carve a developing planet like Earth back into a plain ball of rock, should these foolish Earth people ever try using these things on themselves.

The floor was littered with shipping containers dumped helter-skelter, by people who must have thrown them into the darkness and simply run away in terror. Eggs the size of basketballs, spilled from an overturned wooden packing case, their shells glowing dimly from the warmth of Mau’s body as he drew near. Peering curiously at vague shapes moving inside, Mau jumped back when he heard the shells start to crack.

He nearly fell into an empty box laying on its side. The beguiling melody of a Siren’s song drifted out, urging him to step inside. Enchanted, he nearly surrendered to the rising chorus, although he was perfectly aware they would snare his soul forever with a promise of joyful release from sorrow, of which he had none.

Hurrying away, Mau averted his eyes as he passed rows of glass crocks, afraid to see pieces of someone he knew. There were enough strange things inside this one bunker to outfit several Las Vegas horror museums.

Pushing through a tangle of packing paper, Mau felt a thrill when he saw the round ship he had been searching for floating by itself near the large front doors. Gold-colored and slightly smaller than his own ship, the saucer was hovering a few inches off the concrete floor, which was good because that meant it still had power.

The builder’s nameplate to the right of the hatchway confirmed that this was Raya’s ship from her lost Egyptian expedition. The craft itself was of no interest to Mau, what he wanted was the Memory Pearl that he expected to find inside. This one Pearl might possibly be the only Pearl left in the galaxy. It was certainly the last Pearl from Planet Alna, where Pearls had been banned for at least a 900 years.

When Mau was young, before he flunked physics and changed his major to political science, he’d studied engineering. His professor, a cat named Fenning, had read the forbidden books and told the class what he’d learned about Pearls. Fenning had said the Pearls were invented by the people who had once lived on Alna to preserve the complete historical record of the planet. There was at least one Pearl aboard every intergalactic ship, to preserve their cultural heritage in case their world fell victim to some existential mischief. With unlimited data storage, Pearls also became a popular medium for entertainment on interplanetary ships plying the trade routes.

Memory Pearls were said to have been striking to look at. Colored in midnight blue, bright red, and violet, their electric sapphire patterns swirled like clouds of luminescent gas within their dark sphere. Small enough to swallow, at one time, foolish young cats ate them for thrills and lost their souls. After those unfortunate experiments, an engineer with a sense of humor sealed each Pearl inside a popular type of cat toy that was too big to swallow.

Eventually, the political elite decided that history was dangerous. Possession of Pearls was penalized. Discarded into a singularity, Pearls ceased to exist, and all of history was erased. Unfortunately, along with Alna history, went knowledge that the early explorers had collected about the known Universe when they traded throughout the Galaxy. The end of information commenced a dark age when the good cats of Alna commenced living their lives for the moment, without regard for each other. This was the culture in which Sona and her companions grew up.

Mau knew that once armed with even one of these Pearls, those forgotten secrets would make him the most powerful cat in the galaxy.

He was more than a little surprised when he saw the interior of the ship. Although the basic layout was almost identical to the functional design of his own modern fleet, the cabin of this ancient craft was richly decorated in a motif of flowing botanical shapes coordinated in greens and amber. Leafy tendrils twined a spiral pattern around the terraced steps. The carpet was woven in a tapestry of leaves, while elegant fronds of prehistoric ferns embossed a primal rain-forest canopy across the arching cabin ceiling.

None of this did anything to inspire Mau’s better nature as his paws explored the console’s external memory sockets.

They were all empty.

Mau desperately searched the floor, once twice, three times. What could have happened to the Pearl? He bounded out through the hatch, sneezing as he sniffed around the floor of the dusty bunker. If he’d remembered to bring a tablet, he could use it to locate the lost Pearl. But that Earth cat distracted him when she stole his collar. He’d have to walk all the way back to the ship to retrieve his tablet. He’d deal with that silly cat severely for wasting his precious time.

Mau stepped through the building, guided by the light of his diamond collar, taking particular care not to be drawn into that empty box where invisible voices entreated him to join their spectral crew. He’d used similar traps himself when he needed to fill out crew rosters for a one-way voyage into deep space. He’d even used one to lure Sona’s father, Jan, to the slave mines of Karrig’s moon when the rebellious cat had advocated for the feral cats of Alna.

Unwittingly, Mau stole a glance along the row of glass crocks and froze in his tracks when he saw the grayish body of his old flying instructor Shreeng staring back through sightless eyes from the inside of an ethanol-filled jar. Right next to Shreeng was his co-pilot Beej, stirring up memories of more innocent times. Mau swallowed hard. Better them than me, he reflected, forcing himself to keep moving. Fenning, too, he reflected, when he needed to score points with the local council.

Mau jumped outside again through the back window and ran toward the front of the building. As he turned up the canyon road, he felt the waves of the golden ship’s powerful Zarcleron engine powering up inside the bunker. Mau doubled back to listen at the large front doors, his heart leaping in fear. Had he inadvertently awakened the ancient ship? If it took off now, he’d never recover the Pearl and his plans would all be dashed to moon dust.

The grinding of the ancient engine, choked with dirt after thousands of years the desert, quickly grew deafening. Mau heard guards shouting on the other side of the building. He swiveled his ears toward the door, timing the rising and falling vibrations. He still had time to run for safety, but the hypnotic sound held him in place.

Finally purged of desert dust, the engine’s screaming noise diminished to a faint arpeggio of notes like a musical top pleasantly rising in pitch. With a roar of rending metal and shattered concrete, the ship blasted into the night sky through a hole in the bunker’s roof. Echoes boomed off the canyon walls as a great cloud of dust rolled up the gravel road. Mau was thrown into the road when the shock wave blew out the doors. After it was gone, silence folded back, broken only by the thump and crash of concrete falling to Earth, some of it from a great height.

Farther up the canyon at the top of a ravine, an enormous boom jarred MeMe back to life. Through sleepy eyes, she caught a momentary glimpse of a round shape racing across the moon in a flash of gold. At the same time, below her perch, a cloud of dust swept up the canyon road.

MeMe knew that Mau would find her if she stayed where she was. She peered cautiously over the rocks, but his ship was gone. At least it meant Mau had flown away and wouldn’t threaten her anymore. But how would she ever get home?

Worry made her careless as she climbed down the ravine. Her foot slipped on a stone and she tumbled down the slope in a shower of stones. Sliding ten cat-lengths on her belly, she braced herself against a sharp rock, while the stones bounced off a ledge below her feet. But instead of dropping down into the gully, most of the stones rattled to a stop in midair.

MeMe cautiously crawled down the slope, glancing sideways at the dust, rocks, and gravel strangely suspended in midair. MeMe thought it was a curious sight because things like that usually fall to the ground.

The cloud of dust floating up the canyon made her sneeze. When she opened her eyes, she could see the shape of Sona’s saucer outlined in dust.

MeMe whispered, merl tsssik, and the ship’s hatch slid open.

Leaping through the doorway, she screamed, merl tsssik, over her shoulder as she jumped onto the pilot’s seat.

In her panic, MeMe forgot the words Sona had told her to say.

Was it, ship fly home? — or was it ship fly back?

A pleasant voice startled her. “May I help you find your destination?”

MeMe nervously looked over her shoulder for another cat, but the cabin was empty. At any minute Mau might burst in through the hatch to zap her with that diamond collar of his.

The voice spoke again, “You seem to have a problem. How can I help you?” This time MeMe realized what she heard was the voice of the ship coming from inside the console.

“Please take me home . . . I mean—” suddenly MeMe was so nervous she couldn’t remember where she lived, what state, or even the name of the county, township, or zip-code. So she called out,

“SHIP FLY HOME!”

The engines immediately started their musical warm-up.

“Please remain seated at all times.” the voice advised. “The washroom is upstairs to the left. Have a pleasant flight,”

MeMe wondered how she could do all three of those things at once, since two of them were mutually exclusive and she might need to do one.

At that moment, viewing screens lit up all around the cabin. MeMe watched the desert rapidly slip below, as everything outside became smaller and smaller. Soon, two USAF F-35 stealth fighters flew up to intercept them. The saucer accelerated rapidly away, leaving the aircraft far behind.

MeMe was feeling about as tired as a toad in a typhoon, so she placed her trust in the pleasant voice to get her home safely and curled up on her purple cushion with a deep sigh.

She was running through the tall grass with Java and Ridley. Wet with dew, rolling in the summer flowers, listening to frogs peeping by the pond. They were all finally friends. Watson pounced on her and they tumbled over and over, splashing in the sunshine.

Java gave her swimming lessons.

When MeMe opened her eyes, she stretched and yawned and saw the world outside was filled with millions of stars. A beautiful blue and green marble floated in the distance.

The pleasant voice announced, “We will be approaching your destination — HOME — in five minutes. Please remain seated.”

“Home? What home? Where are we?” Somehow, home had turned silvery gray, with craters.

“Home is the Mother Ship,” the pleasant voice informed her calmly.

The Mother Ship? Ahead of her was a huge object that looked like a giant copper blimp covered with plumbing and antennas. It wasn’t pretty, but it sure was big, and it might have been some cat’s home but it wasn’t hers.

As she looked past the Mother Ship, MeMe saw that for once, Mau had been telling the truth. Arrayed above the moon lay the entire Alna military fleet, possibly all 5000 of them. They were stretched out in a wide formation, row after row as far as she could see. But there wasn’t time to count them all because she could see the doors of the Mother Ship yawning open to swallow her inside.

“Please, whoever you are—”

“I am Katrina. May I be of service?”

“Yes, please take me home.”

“You are almost there. Arrival will be in one minute.”

MeMe was panic stricken. “No, no. This is not my home.”

“Where is home? Katrina asked politely.

“It’s in P-P-PP—” In her panic, MeMe had forgotten. She looked around wildly. Finally remembering what Sona had told her to say.

“TAKE ME BACK—NOW! — Please.”

“It is too late to go back.” Katrina explained politely. “Was this not your intended destination?”

“Oh NO!” MeMe wailed. “When they catch me I’ll never get home.”

“I am so sorry,” Katrina apologized. “If I were you, I would hide.”