Tikket

Tikket is the youngest of four Chthonari on a Federation contractor crew cutting new members under Eden Space Habitat's dock ring in the spring of 2828 UCSD — the understructure the fold-approach monitoring's mounts bolt through — and the first of the crew to hear one of those mounts ring under load where the other five did not. The name is a struck signature, two quick strikes and a close, spelled the way a human ear renders it.

The Crew

Four on one deck, on their first posting off the Undersong Belt: Kattik, who keeps the log; Tekka, who agrees with Kattik about most things and disagrees about all of them; Tsikk, who asks the habitat; and Tikket. The cutting was good — members cut to what the ring would still be doing when the cutting stopped — and the habitat's monitoring read the run and called it normal, and the certification went up, and the crew stayed on for the snagging list, which is the part of a job where one stands on what one has left and listens to it. A sealed module clamped to the understructure is the burrow; the deck plating between the four of them is the Undersong, as much of it as Eden carries, and it does not travel through air.

What Tikket Cannot Do

Hear a voice, or read a face. Nothing in the airborne layer reaches a Chthonari, so Tikket cannot be charmed, and cannot tell a human who is joking from one who is frightened. Hear anything at all when not in contact with structure. See a thing as raw — a stock plate is already good for something, and so is a person. Explain the Undersong to anyone who does not stand on it; the crew can be taught that it exists, and that is the ceiling.

Character Notes

Tikket has learned the course and has begun, somewhere in the last year, to listen to the tunnel — the distinction Chthonari spectators watch for in the Long Skitter, and the one that separates an apprentice from an engineer. On Eden it showed as a step that was a finger's width lower than the last: the third mount rang a little, and Tikket put it with the course, because Eden is a tunnel nobody has tuned and everything in it rings a little. By the second day the other five mounts had settled into what they were and the third had not. Kattik said it was the course. Tikket did not argue, which in a crew of four on one deck is not nothing.

What Tikket found, standing on the mount with the ring quiet at the end of a shift, was not a fault. The mount was ringing right, for a mount carrying more than the certification said it carried — a structure doing its job under a load nobody had written down, telling the truth to the one person in the room who could not repeat it. That is the crew's whole posting in one member: the humans are kind, the module is sealed, and everybody who can decide anything lives in the air.

Kattik told Tikket once, plainly, and will not again: You were not wrong about the mount. You were wrong about what it meant. Those are different, and the second is the one that gets better.