D'khara lay in his cot in the tent at camp. Two hours earlier, Dr. Navarre had dragged him in and run his vitals.

"Well," Dr. Navarre had said, "your blood pressure is 180/110, your heart rate is 120, and your temperature is 115 degrees. If you were a human, I'd render an official diagnosis of 'probably dead'." He'd looked down at D'khara. "Unfortunately, I don't know much about dwarf physiology. I can make some guesses though." He walked over to the camp table in the tent. "I'll leave you some antibiotics. Take one every six hours. Other than that, just try to get some rest."

D'khara tried, but his sleep was broken and fitful. He slumbered without rest, plagued by dark visions and unhappy memories.

Their faces floated in his vision, grim, staring, angry. Angry as always. Angry still, for all that it had been ninety-nine years since the accident.

He resisted, as he always did, the draw he felt to relive the accident. Usually he was successful, and he'd had decades of experience tamping down the recollection, but today, whether it was the sickness or the exhaustion or the guilt, the incident replayed itself before him.

He was 35, just old enough to start his first real job. He'd been apprenticed for fourteen years, and everyone, everyone was amazed how good he was with the machines.

Of course he was. And his job assignment was sure to be something important, something critical, something flashy and amazing. He'd been hearing about what a tremendous talent he was for so long that he'd even idly wondered if he might be inducted directly onto the Royal Mechanics' team, unheard of at his age.

When he'd arrived at his assignment and found only a clapped out rock crusher D'khara was furious. The retiring dwarf had shuffled forward to hand him the ceremonial wrench. D'khara fumed as he took it. How dare they? Didn't they know who he was? The things he could do? How was he supposed to exhibit his mastery on a meaningless old clunker like this?

Full to the brim with abraded pride, he determined to rebuild the crusher to run as smooth as it had been when it was new. Every inch of the thing's 14-foot length sagged or squealed or clattered. Rust, the ever-present enemy, had conquered and nearly destroyed the old machine. Clanking, groaning, and heaving, it spent half its energy complaining while it ran.

Standard operating procedure was to file a request, get permission to shut the thing down, and do the work as quickly as you could. The mine had machines, but the mine also was a machine-- the excess heat from one unit was bled off to power another, extra pressure here was piped there to drive a flapper valve yonder. Every station was tied to dozens of others, and taking one out of the mix tended to cause a lot of downtime in seemingly-unrelated areas. The paperwork took weeks, sometimes months to get through, assuming it ever got through at all.

Well. They wanted to stick him on this clapped out pile of parts, they could stick their SOP. He'd show them.

He'd rebuild the machine while it was still running.

The job was tricky. The crusher was a continuous duty tool, always in operation. Changing out a hopper when tons of rocks could come randomly falling through it will test the stoutest spirit. It was a terrifying, painstaking process, but piece by piece D'khara rebuilt the machine, scavenging parts from other machines to keep it running while he restored or fabricated what he needed.

His proudest moment came when he replaced the motor.

It was a ticklish operation, swapping out a running motor. He'd cobbled a new motor together out of borrowed parts and castoffs and tested it as best he could. He'd had to build a custom motor transfer mount, with a special harness and rack to perform the operation without any downtime. But as he aligned the new shaft and shunted the power from the rebuilt motor, the machine calmed, quieted, and hummed. The beautiful, sweet quietness of a cleanly running machine. He quickly disconnected the old motor and rolled the harness away.

He spent some time admiring his machine. There was still rust on the exterior, various bits needed tuning, and overall it needed cleanup and a good repainting, but it ran so smoothly.

Tossing in restless sleep, D'khara tried to stop the memory, stay in the last happy moment of his life, to shut out what came next. But brute exhaustion clamped his body into unwanted unconsciousness, and his treacherous mind dragged him onward.

Old Lakhal the masterdwarf came running in.

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"What are you doing?" he screamed.

"What are you doing?" D'khara said.

"I'm trying to find out why our 40-ton compressor is dancing around like it's 4 days into the Mead festival! We've got a huge oversurge of power about to blow the pistons out of the thing! Power from your crusher!"

D'khara, caught halfway between terror and indignity, retorted.

"Well, I made my crusher more efficient. Maybe you should try it. If we all took some time to improve our stations, we'd see some real--"

Lakhal screamed and pulled at the sides of his beard.

"Shut your fool mouth and drop your power! You're going to tear our compressor apart!"

Fear finally started creeping over his pride.

"I, uh, I can't. The motor transfer mount only works once. I get flow from upstream, Gandan's crew feeds what the crusher needs. There's no throttle."

With a despairing cry, Lakhal spun and rushed off. D'khara, starting to panic, rushed after him. Maybe there was a throttle on the compressor, or he could pinch off some of the excess or bleed it somehow. He didn't even know how power was transferred to the compressor, was it steam? Electricity? Pneumo pressure? Foolish! Why hadn't he taken time away from his rebuild to at least see how it was connected to the mine?

He was still spinning through the possibilities when he got to the main shaft and saw the full disaster of what was unfolding.

The main shaft was an enormous rough hole, thirty to forty feet across, that ran most of the height of the mine. Feeder shafts, transports, and all manner of exploratory shafts spiderwebbed off of the main shaft at every level.

Lakhal's compressor was mounted in an alcove off the main shaft, with long tubes providing pressure for condensers and tools and various other machinery. The massive machine was blatting and rattling and screaming, literally bouncing in its mounts. The racket was unbearably loud as the massive machine beat itself apart from the inside out. The air was rich with the burning stench of boiling lubricant and rapidly overheating steel.

Carnak, Lakhal's apprentice, and Junni, a floating mechanicalist, were on the other side of the compressor, trying to hang onto a bucking valve long enough to crack it open and stabilize the gyrator. Lakhal rushed over to help.

The scene slowed. D'khara knew what came next. He tried to cover his eyes, but they were already closed in sleep. He couldn't block the images from within.

"Here comes my bad luck," he muttered.

From the recesses of his memory, Fleer's voice floated up. "This wasn't luck. This was a choice. My choice."

One of the mounting brackets that held the compressor to the floor sheared the retaining bolt clean off. Then the machine really started to move and shake. In less than a second, the bucking device had ripped free of the other mounting brackets. Tearing itself free of its mooring, it jerked, knocking the other three dwarves back violently.

Helpless, D'khara watched as the vibrating machine walked its way to the cliff edge of the shaft, pushing the three dwarves before it. He watched their faces as it swept them off the edge and plunged down the shaft after them.

The horrible racket it made as it fell, and the jaw-clenchingly long time before the final crash as it impacted the bottom of the shaft were seared into him. He could still count the long seconds in his mind perfectly.

Their faces floated in his vision as they did nearly every night, but he'd never spoken their names since the accident. A third of a lifetime, and he'd never acknowledged them.

But he did now.

Lakhal.

Carnak.

Junni.

In sleep, his mouth formed the words. The names of the dead. His fault. His responsibility.

"I'm sorry," he blurted to his hallucinations. "I am so sorry. I didn't listen. I didn't listen and I didn't learn, and it's my fault. It was all my fault."

For the first time, he accepted his responsibility. It wasn't fate, or the universe, or randomness that killed those dwarves, it was his pride.

Lakhal, who would probably be retiring about now.

Carnak, who'd no doubt have made masterdwarf and be happily working on some new device for his collection.

Junni, who'd have had the fourth and fifth children he and his wife had wanted.

And D'khara himself, pulled out of life and time, thrown through an escalating series of failures and ending up topside, out of options and at the end of his rope, would have been the ascendant masterdwarf he always should have been.

All those lives ripped away.

Not his luck, just his mistake.

A great terrifying gulf of guilt yawned open before him. He'd always been too weak to face the monstrosity of his mistake. He did so now, and it was as terrible as he'd always imagined.

But as it swallowed him, he recognized it. All the years of shifting blame-- talking about his bad luck-- hadn't defeated or avoided the monster of guilt, only pushed it out of sight where it could freely chew on him. It dawned on him that the nickname they'd stuck him with, "Dakarva", had not been a nod to any unnatural bad luck he'd possessed. It was the name he'd chosen for himself. Never learning from his mistakes, always blaming his luck and never his actions. Never taking responsibility.

Well. That was enough of that. Now he could face the guilt. He could take the responsibility. And despite what he'd feared for nearly a hundred years, the guilt was not more than he could bear.

After all, he'd been carrying it all this time anyway.

He couldn't change what he'd done. But he could be better. And he could start right now, right here. The Riotfish deserved it. Fired or not, he would accept the responsibility for his mistakes.

The faces faded, vanishing into the swirling of his exhausted mind, but their names still rang strong and true in his ears.

D'khara fell into a deep slumber, unmarred by terrifying visions.

He could go home now. But he knew somehow that he wouldn't have to.