The various levels of the spires are called "habbles" (sp?).  It seems that you have huge spires built to allow people to live off the surface of this planet.  I would conjecture that the habbles are the habitat tiers of the spires.

'Habble' seems to obviously be an amalgam of 'Habitat' and 'Level'.

The warrior caste are genetically modified.  Possible the cats were too. (If someone wanted to give cat enhancements to humans, why not give cats human like intelligence too?  For proof of concept, or because they could, or because the mad geneticist in question was a crazy cat-person who wanted their conversations to be more meaningful...)

Mention is made of the cats having thumbs of some sort, too, though they're obviously not as dexterous as human hands.