Kettsa

Kettsa is a Chthonari and a Star Ranger: a Senior Officer of the Engineering Corps in the fold-scaffold specialization, posted in the record's present, 2826 UCSD, to the Corps' scaffold work at the Earth–Sun L5 fold-staging zone, where hulls sit almost still while their scaffolds form around them. The record says that Chthonari serve in that specialization in numbers well out of proportion to their population, by individual choice and never by quota, and until this page named nobody who did. Kettsa is one of a great many, and the record has no reason to call them the first of anything.

The name is a struck signature, as every Chthonari name is: a strike, the same strike held, and a scrape left open to ring, spelled the way a human ear renders it. The record renders a Chthonari person as they, the Undersong's own person-marking being contact rather than sex, and a reader on a page is in contact with no one.

Known History

• Born in the Undersong Belt, in a burrow settlement the record does not name. Which settlement, and what it is tuned to, is the Belt's own business and the Archive has not asked.
• A cutter on contract work under the Federation's material-support compact, to which the Belt contributes its fold-scaffold engineering: the same trade Tsikk, Tekka, Kattik and Tikket follow under Eden's dock ring. Kettsa left it for the Corps. Whether Kettsa knows that crew the record does not say; the Belt is dozens of burrow-clusters, and the record has not placed either party in one.
• Recommended to the Engineering Corps by one of the Chthonari recruiters the species page names, and taken in on the fast track for experienced entrants: an older entrant who arrives already doing the work does not wait out the ordinary intake. Kettsa held Novice for some weeks and Cadet for some months, each rank in turn and none passed over, since the Corps skips no rung for anyone, and reached Field Officer inside the two years the rule allows. The fast track ran out there, as it is built to; the fifth bar came later, by the ordinary review on the certification half of the ladder.
• Senior Officer, Engineering Corps, in 2826 UCSD, at the Earth–Sun L5 staging zone. The record does not fix the year Kettsa entered the Corps, nor how long the Senior rank has been held, and places them nowhere else.

What Kettsa Cannot Do

Hear a voice, or read a face: nothing in the airborne layer reaches a Chthonari, so Kettsa cannot be charmed, cannot tell a colleague who is joking from one who is frightened, and takes a statement at its stated content. Hear anything at all when not in contact with structure. See a thing as raw. Explain the Undersong to anyone who does not stand on it.

The Work

A fold scaffold is a structure under gradient stress that has to be read and corrected before it fails, and a Chthonari reads it the way the species has read rock since before it had spaceflight: through the hull, through the deck plating, through whatever solid structure is underfoot, as a thing the structure is trying to say. The species page gives the honest answer every Chthonari engineer gives when asked how they knew a gradient was off before the instruments confirmed it, which is that it sounded wrong, and Kettsa gives the same one. The instruments then confirm it or they do not, and certification runs on the instruments, as it must; a reading no colleague can share is not a certification item, and Kettsa has never asked for it to be one. What it is, is earlier.

Senior Officer is the rank the ladder calls experienced field rank, frequently second on a team or shift, and that is Kettsa's place on a scaffold shift: the one a Field Officer's reading is checked against, and the one who stands on the plating while a hull's scaffold forms and says, before anyone has looked at a figure, whether it is sitting in tune. The Chthonari rendering of the rank, in the ladder's other tongues, is a member others brace against. Kettsa holds that the rendering is exact and the tab is right, in that order.

The subtractive habit of the founding craft comes with them. Presented with a stock plate, a Chthonari asks what it is already good for, and presented with a scaffold reading that disagrees with itself, Kettsa's first move is the burrow's: take the whole account and cut from it everything the structure is not saying, until what is left is what it is doing. Colleagues who expect a theory to be built and tested find the method slow to start and quick to finish. Asked how many, Kettsa answers with a relation, and is surprised to be asked again.

The Uniform

On duty Kettsa wears the Corps' modular field shell as the quartermaster record fits it to a Chthonari body plan: the Engineering Corps' graphite with steel seam-piping, in sections seated over the upper carapace only, because a Chthonari hears through the organs along each limb and the lower carapace, and a shell that covered them would deafen the Ranger it was issued to. Every limb and the whole underside stay in contact with the structure. The rank tab, five bars on a copper insert for the engineering track, is seated at the forward edge of the shell behind the head, the point on this body that corresponds to a human collar, and is read by Kettsa's colleagues at a glance and by Kettsa, on another Ranger, by limb-tip or through the deck. In any disagreement between the Undersong's naming of a rank and the tab, the tab governs, and Kettsa has never been heard to dispute it.

Kettsa holds the Engineering guild's fold-scaffold certification, as anyone doing the work must; whether the guild has yet found a distinction in Kettsa's body of work the record does not say, and a distinction is not rank in any case.

Character Notes

Kettsa is the only Chthonari on the staging zone's roster, which the record gives as a fact of the posting and not of the Corps. The species page names the cost plainly: not unkindness from colleagues, but a shared structure nobody else in the room can feel. A crew of four on one deck has each other through the plating. One Chthonari on a deck has the deck. Kettsa carries that, does not complain of it, and is quartered, as any Chthonari must be for sustained work, in a sealed and pressurised module with solid structure underfoot, which the Corps provides as it provides an Ilveth a cold room.

A Chthonari cannot see a person as blank any more than a plate, and Kettsa's manner with a new Deputy is the courtesy the humans on the shift do not always recognise as one: the Deputy is already good for something, and the question is what. The humans are kind. The record notes, without a reading, that Kettsa has not been heard to say that the posting is lonely, and has not been heard to say that it is not.

The record gives Kettsa no age, no family, no crew of origin and no history in the Belt beyond the trade they left, and it has not established what the service ages come to for a Chthonari, those being set per people by the Medical Corps. It places them on the plating at L5 in 2826 UCSD, in uniform, reading a scaffold, and nowhere else.

See also

• The Chthonari and The Undersong Belt
• Lagrange Points and Fold-Space Transit, the work
• Rank and the Chain of Command, for the fast track and the rule that no rung is skipped; Rank, Insignia, and the Ranger Uniform; The Ladder in Other Tongues
• The Star Rangers Academy, on intake
• Tsikk, Tekka, Kattik and Tikket, a contractor crew in the trade Kettsa left