“So, how did it start? Well, I seem to recall it began with me running for my life…

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BONCHANCE

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My parents named me ‘Good Luck’, which was ironic because it turned out they had none. Father had been a well-paid steam mechanic and inspector on the Yonquil and Mallot Railroad until a shoddy repair of a line had detonated, the high-pressure live steam cutting him in half like a razor blade. My mother had been pregnant with my younger brother, and the shock of what had happened to my father sent her into labor far too early. She and my brother did not survive. I was nineteen, the economy was a wreck because of the costs of the Emperor’s last war, and all my family savings were taken by the courts to repay the railroad for the damage my father had ‘inflicted’ by bothering to actually do his job, and so I was on the streets.

Not being able to afford to continue my education at the Imperial Academy of Engineers, I was forced to utilize the skills I had learned in mechanical and electro-mechanical mechanisms along with all that I had learned from my father; I worked hand to mouth, repairing whatever I could for whatever I could get. This lasted for several years as I traveled the highways and byways of the Empire, lasting in a town only long enough until the Builders Guild noticed that I was undercutting their rates and had me arrested or run out of town or arrested then run out of town if I wasn’t fast enough. I learned to recognize the signs and fled before that happened, as when they caught me, they would confiscate or destroy whatever tools I had managed to acquire. Replacing those was always tedious and frequently difficult, so I started staying on the fringes of civilization out in the farmlands where the guildsmen would never go. No money and no creature comforts for them to lounge on while they had their ‘apprentices’ do the actual labor. Out here, I mainly got paid in food and shelter, occasionally a little silver but generally not, and was left alone.

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At the moment, I was looking for shelter. I was far north in the Pine Wilderness of the Duchy of the North Star. The Duchy was about as far as you could get on the fringe of the Empire and was a major source of lumber and iron. There was also a fair amount of good farmland out in these lonely wastes unharmed by the Final War. Out past the Duchy were outcasts and beasts, though a point could be made that the outcasts were more beastly than any wild animal. This close to the border, there were raiders, but there were also fortified farms, and farms had things break all the time. Much of the time, the farmers could fix their own problems, but there was always something, no exception, that stopped them cold, and that was what I could repair for them.

Trudging down the shattered Old Road that led through the woods, I kept on high alert. The road was the easiest way of travel, but also highly tempting for raiders or thieves to grab a lone traveler. The last farm I was at had said that the one I was on my way to had a traction engine that had been giving them trouble. I had not been planning to go this far north, but that kind of job had the potential to pay well. Any farm that could have gotten a traction engine out here in the first place was one that had some large amount of wealth, so I had kept heading north. Night was falling, and I moved to the side of the road to find a safe place to camp.

I had a small fire going, very small to reduce the amount of smoke and glow as much as possible, and buried in a small trench under a low pine tree so the overhanging branches would scatter the plume and keep any of the firelight from traveling too far. In my experience, there was no substitute for extreme caution.

The next chore was cooking up a squirrel I had potted with my sling. My rifle rounds were far too dear to use on small game, and my hand-charged revolver didn’t have near the accuracy at that range, and the thumb-thick bullet would have turned the entire beast to paste if I had even managed to hit it, so for small game hunting, I used my sling. It was tasty enough with a little salt and wild onion that I had pulled up as I had passed by them.

After dinner, I banked the fire and rolled up in my bedroll before dragging the dapple-dyed sheet of fabric that was my poncho over me to break up my outline. As I said, extreme caution.

It was still dark when I awoke to the sound of voices.

“You sure you smelled smoke?”

“Yeah. Somewhere in this direction. Cooked meat, too.”

Reaching over, I shoveled earth on my fire and, under the cover of my poncho, began rolling my bedroll and fastening it to my pack. That second voice had a weird snort to it, and, seeing as I had buried the remains of the squirrel, meant that the speaker was probably a soc. If he was a soc, that meant all his senses of sight and hearing were as good or better than his sense of smell, so I was being as quiet as I could and checked the loads in my revolver, just in case. I worked my head through the neck hole of my poncho and made sure that the hood was up and my scarf covered most of the paleness of my face before sliding my pack onto my back.

“Which way?”

The first voice was closer now, and peering out from under the branches, I could see the faint glow of a lantern’s light.

“Toward you, I think. It’s fading, though,” the soc’s voice replied. With that, the light began to move toward me.

Before I had settled into my camp, I had taken the precautions to only gather the wood for my fire significantly far away from my campsite and to brush away or cover any tracks leading underneath the pine tree. Crawling quietly, I maneuvered to get the tree trunk between them and me. Taking great pains to keep my tools from rattling and my rifle from getting entangled in the branches, I continued out the far side of the tree before rising to a crouch and trying to keep as much cover from the searchers as possible.

I was in trouble. If that soc was any good, he would be able to pick up my trail from the camp, so I needed to find a defensible position before they could catch up. Socs might not be as good at scent tracking as a well-trained dog, but considering how fresh my trace would be, this one didn’t need to be.

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

They were still casting around for my camp, and I used that to get further and further away, to a point I could stand and start moving faster, occasionally glancing over my shoulder and looking for the lantern. There was a growing sliver of moon in the sky, and between that and the starlight that penetrated the trees, I could see well enough to make decent speed as I zig-zagged between the trunks. The ground was starting to rise as the terrain got hillier and more rugged. The trees were getting sparser as well because exposed stone was becoming more common than the loam that I had been crossing.

Glancing at the North Star, it was clear I was moving East more than North as I broke onto a ridgeline. Crouching back down to prevent myself from being skylighted, I continued scrambling along the edge of the ridge. Just as I saw the light finally breaking free of the treeline below and behind me.

There were three figures behind me: the figure of the man with the lamp, the giant shape of a soc, and a third man with a rifle. It didn’t appear as if they had seen me yet. The dapple color of my poncho breaking up my form as I moved along the rock wall. I thought about stopping and beginning to open fire with my rifle. I was certain I could stop the two normal men if I hit them, but the soc was a different matter. They were notoriously hard to kill or slow down; it would take multiple hits. I wasn’t a good enough shot to take the chance of merely wounding him, and once he knew where I was, he could move unbelievably fast and be on top of me before I could get away. I kept going, making sure I stayed downwind of them until I found a crack in the rock. This was good; the soc was simply too large to squeeze inside, and the other two, I could engage them with my revolver if they got too close.

Stripping off my pack and pushing it ahead of me, I slithered into the gap; it went forward a good twenty feet or so and was only about two foot high, then it suddenly got more expansive, and the litter and leaves that had been blown from the inside gave way to a smooth floor. It was pitch dark in here, so I lay on my belly with my revolver in my hand and watched out the gap from which I had entered, taking a quick sip out of my water bottle and trying to breathe slow to calm my racing heart.

It seemed like it took forever, but finally, I heard heavy breathing as they approached. I carefully screwed a scrap of cloth into my right ear while holding the other scrap in my left hand. In this confined space, the report from my revolver would be brutally punishing.

The breathing intensified, and there was a snuffling sound. He was testing the air.

“I think I have him!” the soc snorted. “He’s in there!”

“Can you get him?”

“No…too narrow. Little bastard.”

I flicked the bar safety that blocked the hammer on my revolver back and, using my left hand, stuffed the cloth scrap in my left ear. Sounds became muted, but that was a small price to pay to protect myself.

There was a muffled conversation now as I lay there, ready. Eventually, a shape filled my vision; it was the soc, and I suddenly saw a bundle of green brush wrapped around a burning branch. They were going to smoke me out. Grabbing my water bottle, I soaked my scarf. This would help, but my eyes were starting to sting. Behind the smoke, I could see the figures dance in and out of my line of fire, never standing still long enough to allow me a shot. Somehow, the smoke wasn’t as thick as it could be, though?

As I rolled to one side to think, I realized that this chamber was a lot larger than I had expected, easily tall enough to allow me to stand, and the light coming from the smudge they had tossed in revealed that it was floored with cement. I got to my feet and pulled out my own hand lamp; they weren’t going to see its shine beyond the smoke and flames from their smudge, to shine around.

The chamber was twenty by ten by seven foot or so; and had markings on one wall in faded but still readable white lettering on a red-painted background next to a heavy metal door.

R-34 CDO

Unauthorized Access Forbidden

Lethal Force Authorized

It hit me; this was a Final War bunker and, more than that, what looked like an undiscovered Final War bunker. Over the four-hundred and ten years since the war and the Pox ended, many of them had been found, but as they were bunkers and targets of military importance during the war, most of them had been destroyed. Even so, the technology and resources a heavily damaged one of these bunkers contained had allowed Empires and Kingdoms to form. I could not let my pursuers find this. The fact that it was a Final War bunker entry explained why the smoke wasn’t accumulating; at least, a place like this would have some kind of ventilation.

Looking back over at the smudge, I saw it was beginning to end its burn, so I extinguished my lamp and, safeing my revolver and holstering it, I hefted my rifle in my hands and putting my back to the wall, stood next to the opening.

The smoke still coiled in the air, but now, with no new smoke entering and the night breeze pushing clean air down low, I had no issues breathing…but they didn’t know that. Pulling down my scarf, I began to cough and gasp as though I was dying.

“We got him!” I vaguely heard the muffled yell. “Give me your shooter…I’m going in!”

Perfect.

He crawled inside, lamp in one hand and single-shot snaplock in the other. As soon as he saw the door, he scrambled faster forward and was not expecting me to smash him in the back of his head with my rifle butt as soon as more than half his body had cleared the entrance. Grabbing him by the collar and dragging him the rest of the way out, I took his pistol from his stunned fingers and shot him with it. The roar echoed in the chamber, but I was still capable of speech and yelled out immediately, “Finished him off! Come on in!”

As I heard the scrambling of the other man crawling in, I moved the corpse out of the direct line of sight and set his lamp to illuminate the door with the cone before returning to my position. His partner was clubbed and had his throat slit, and now it was time for the hardest part. Holding the first one’s lantern ahead of me with my revolver in my right hand, I wormed my way back to the outside. At the entrance, I could see the soc peering in, his light-sensitive eyes trying to compensate for the lantern’s glare. Pausing, I shot him three times in the face, and at this range, even I couldn’t miss. With a roar, he stumbled backward and managed to step off the cliffside, howling all the way to the bottom. Exiting the gap, I looked down and saw his broken body sprawled across a rock. Socs are difficult to kill with their internal armor but not impossible with enough force. Gravity was clearly enough force.

Grabbing the two packs and the snaplock rifle that had been left here, I retreated back inside before dragging the two corpses out and dumping them over the side as well, after removing the powder and shot and any other useful items from them. They had finger bone necklaces, which I had heard was the signature of the Dark Land raider band. That was bad, but the odds of them being discovered after the scavengers got through with them, especially since they would be found far below where they had died, meant I still had some concealment. Still, I did what I could to rinse away the soc’s blood from the facial bleeding and hide the foot marks and soot from the smudge. There was no benefit to making it easier to find this place.

With that nasty business taken care of, it was time to examine the door.