It’s her job to float down through solid rock, wearing the interphasic suit. Atoms buzzing on a slightly different frequency to most of the solid matter in the universe. Nudged to an adjacent subdomain of time and space where she can still observe this one, but can pass through it like a ghost, without the usual resistance.

There’s the risk of catastrophic realignment, where the interphasic field collapses suddenly and she returns to solid matter while she’s still inside an asteroid. Nobody has any idea of what that feels like, when it happens. Your atoms suddenly coexisting in the same atomic space as solid rock and metal. It might be instant and painless. It might be long and horrifying. But that’s why her cut of the profit is bigger than anyone else’s.

She’s looking for shiny space rocks. Gone are the old days of exploratory laser-boring and magnetic surveys, long and laborious and often fruitless. It’s much cheaper for the big asteroid-cracking firms to just send a geophaser like her down to have a look around. If she finds anything worth extracting they can blast the whole rock to smithereens and mine the rubble.

She’s already got the feeling that this is a good rock. But she has a few minutes in which to enjoy herself, before she has to make her report. She glides down through alternating stratas of rock and iron. Following rich lodes of quadritanium and veins of tricobalt, formed over thousands of years in the strange pressures of the void. More beautiful for being hidden and secret. She’s the only person who gets to see them like this, written through the rock like ancient stories. They’ll very soon be scattered into space, pinwheeling and glittering as a fine dust, suddenly exposed to the shocking coolness of the void.

It makes her sad. There’s a big part of her that would rather let sleeping minerals lie. But the danger pay’s good enough to outweigh her compunctions. A few more years of this and she’ll be able to stop doing it. Move off Earth to one of the freeworld colonies. Buy a big waterfront cabin on Arethusa for her and Meg. They can finally get a dog, take it for walks around the lake. Breathe the fresh air, free of carbon.

Subspace static crackles in her earpiece. The mobile refinery Vega Challenger is idling eight kilometers away, waiting for her report. Preparing the onboard ore processor. Bringing its swarm of collector drones online. Warming up the antiproton beam. They probably want to know what’s taking so long.

“You reading me there, IX1?”

She sighs. “Yeah, recieving.”

“We’re getting some anomalous thermal readings. Take a look for us?”

“Copy,” she says. And dives down, down and further down, into the core of this massive thing. Frowning as she goes. This rock is twenty-seven miles in diameter at its widest point, but that’s not big enough for a molten core. There’s the small chance that somebody’s already at home here, that there’s some kind of habitat bored into the core. Smugglers, pirates. Illegal mining, maybe. Somebody scalping it for profit, the old-fashioned way, with tunnels and handheld mining lasers. Vega Challenger can’t crack it open if there’s already people here. The lawsuit would be astronomical.

So that’s vaguely what she’s expecting, when she dives down into the core. She’s not expecting it to be the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She puts her hand over her mouth. It goes right through her head, because of the interphasic field. But that doesn’t matter.

She’s floating in the middle of a crystal cathedral. Right in the centre of this rock there’s a crystal cave three or four miles wide. A massive viridium deposit. Some of the largest natural crystals she’s ever seen, all crowded together and criss-crossing the chamber from a thousand angles. Great pillars of green and white, standing like jagged knives. And singing, because of course they are. They’re viridium crystals. They have a unique harmonic resonance factor. They pick up subspace signals and amplify them, echoing whatever they hear. Singing the high and mournful song of distant stars, like a crystal choir. Just for her.

If she calls this in, she can retire tomorrow. They use viridium crystal cores for regulating the output threshold of antimatter reactors. They’re one of the most valuable substances in the galaxy. Her cut of the profits could buy a whole moon in the freeworld colonies, not just a cabin by the lake.

But she knows that she can’t allow this place to be destroyed. It’s a work of art, formed by the ancient forces that keep the universe turning. More beautiful for having not been planned by human minds, or built by human hands. She can just leave it here, undisturbed and wonderful, for the rest of time. Singing quietly in the heart of this rock. And she knows, in her heart, that that’s what Meg would want her to do.

She blinks a tear out her eye and sees it float away, a tiny globule of salt and water, into the maze of crystals. That’s the only thing she’ll leave here. She floats back up, through the ceiling of the cavern. Up through the miles of rock towards open space.

“Vega Challenger,” she says. “There’s nothing down here. Just a big hunk of rock.”

#scifi

Shaun looks down at the burbling maw, and the burbling maw looks back up at him.

It’s hard to tell what a volcano might be thinking or feeling, and Shaun has never been the most empathetic person. He could never tell what his ex-wife was thinking or feeling, either. But in this instance he thinks he could hazard a guess.

The volcano looks hungry. It looks impatient.

“This is insane,” he says. “You can’t do this. It can’t be legal.”

There’s a man behind him with a clipboard and high-vis jacket, worn over a strange grass skirt. He’s smiling as he leafs through his paperwork. “Well, there’s no need to get all political, Mister Matthews.”

Accross the mouth of Mount Pushemin is a rickety bridge of wood and rope. The bridge is new, but it’s been made to appear old, because that looks better for the cameras. Now he has been brought here and pushed out onto the bridge by people with machetes. There’s a burgeoning new industry here which has created hundreds of jobs. Arts students and dramaturgs and video game designers were all heavily encouraged to retrain as Volcano Sacrifice Technicians. Now all they have to do to make a living is wear problematic Tiki Warrior costumes and ocassionally push people onto artificial rope bridges. It’s probably more fulfilling than their old work, to be fair.

Shaun swallows. The smoke is making his throat itch, and his eyes water. His cheap plastic brogues are starting to melt, from the heat. Sticking to the slats of the bridge.

“But it’s not right,” he says. “There have to be laws against this.”

The man in the high-vis jacket sighs, behind him. “There was a referendum, wasn’t there?” he says. “The people have spoken. You can’t start complaining just because you don’t like the results.”

“I’m not complaining about the results, I’m complaining because you’re about to throw me into a fucking volcano!”

“Well there’s no need to use vulgar language, Mister Matthews. There’s a huge popular mandate for throwing estate agents into volcanos. We’ve thrown in all of the cabinet ministers and hedge fund managers already.”

“Wasn’t that enough? Can’t we stop, now?”

“Nah,” says the man in the high-vis jacket. “Sorry, mate. Gotta keep doing this until we’ve the appeased the ancient volcano gods. Have you read the papers, recently? I don’t think we’ve appeased them yet. Do you?”

“But there must be somebody else!”

“When surveyed, the majority of respondants ranked estate agents among the top five professional groupings that they’d enjoy seeing fed to a volcano god. So there you are. Can’t argue with raw data like that, can you?”

“Let me off this bridge you heartless bastard!”

“Oh, isn’t that just typical? I show you the hard evidence, and you start resorting to ad hominem attacks. Well that says a lot more about you than it does about me, Mister Matthews. Honestly, some people just aren’t worth debating with. Go on, lads.”

Two of the art students bring down their machetes and chop through the frayed ropes with a single stroke. The bridge goes slack beneath him, and he plunges down, towards the weird red viscosity of the lava. It doesn’t feel very appeased.

Greyhounds are very healthy dogs, but as they get older, they have an increased risk of bone cancer. Make sure to take your greyhound to the vet for regular checkups, especially if you notice a lump.

If your greyhound does develop a tumour, it’s often best to leave them without treatment. Chemotherapy and amputation are options, but they are likely to make your dog miserable in the last few months of its life. Many greyhound owners opt to forgo treatment and focus on giving their dog a good quality of life, for however long it has left.

Towards the very end of your greyhound’s life you may find that they need less exercise, that their apetite decreases, and that they seem agitated. Their daily routine might become less regular, and they might be less content going to bed by themselves in the evenings. But you should try and resist the temptation to stay up with them and keep them company through the night.

One of the interesting things about greyhounds is that they were venerated by the ancient Egyptians, and incorporated in their funeral ceremonies! Anubis, the ancient Egyptian god of death and underworld, had the body of a man and the head of a wolf or jackal, which bears a strong resemblence to greyhounds.

Some greyhound owners have reported seeing Anubis towards the end of their greyhound’s life. Owners of other breeds don’t tend to have this problem, so it’s assumed that Anubis takes a particular interest in greyhounds! And why wouldn’t he? They’re such handsome dogs.

If you see Anubis, he might appear in your home or garden as a barefoot man with dark skin and a wrap-around skirt. Instead of a human head, he’ll have the head of a jackal, and may wear a decorative headress. He may also be carrying a pair of golden scales, to weigh the souls of the dead.

Most greyhound owners find that Anubis appears silently in the middle of the night, so it’s often best to go to bed early during the last few days of your greyhound’s life, if you want to avoid encountering him. Even then, you may see him lurking briefly at the threshold of your bedroom, or standing in the shadows at the bottom of the stairs. He’ll soon go away!

Anubis can be quite frightening, but he’s only there to bear away your greyhound’s soul and carry it to the Underworld. If you let him go about his task with the minium of disturbance, he’s unlikely to disturb you.

Greyhound owners shouldn’t try to prevent Anubis from carrying out his duties as a canine psychopomp. Although you might be understandably distressed, and may wish to delay the inevitable departure of your greyhound’s soul, we strongly reccomend allowing Anubis to do his job! Attempting to interfere can incur his displeasure.

Ultimately the safest way to appease Anubis and avoid his wrath is to follow the advice in the other sections of our greyhound care guide. Owners who have mistreated their greyhound may find that they have angered Anubis, and might find their own souls being born away to the Underworld as well.

Owners who have cared lovingly for their greyhounds, given them a happy home, and fed them plenty of cheese have nothing to fear.

#horror #dogs

I ask him what the lever does, but he just laughs at me. Showing me his sharpened teeth.

I saw this ad on Gumtree. £18,000 pcm for light manual labour in an old converted warehouse in the nice part of the city. Flexible hours.

When I turn up at the place it looks like any other building that used to be for storing things and is now a place where people make phone calls, reply to emails, fill in spreadsheets. I’m not sure what I was expecting exactly, but the name of the company made me think it must be some kind of printing or laminating business. I thought I’d be moving boxes in the cellar, putting things in vans. Not exactly the kind of work I’d done before but I needed something to tide me over until my PhD funding started to come through. I figured I’d work there for a few months, pick up a few pay cheques, and then vanish as soon as I could. Maybe even keep working there part time during the PhD if the hours were decent.

And there was something I liked about the idea of honest labour. Picking things up. Putting them down. Using my body, rather than my brain. Having tired muscles and a sense of fulfilment when I went home to my flat. Not something I’m used to. I’m used to sitting on my arse and typing and feeling vaguely impotent and emasculated. My brother’s in the army. I think I have a kind of complex about it.

Anyway I spend a bit of time on the street making sure I have the right address. There’s this nice renovated studio next door and some kind of gym on the other side, but this one’s got weeds growing through the steps leading up to it. The door looks like it needs repainting. There’s a brass plate with a button set into it, which looks like it’s from a decade before I was born.

After a while I press the button, just to prove to myself that this must be the wrong place.

But then the door begins to crackle, and I realise I’m being buzzed through. I push it open out of sheer embarassment. Let it slam shut behind me.

And then I’m in an empty warehouse, cobwebbed, abandoned. Old mattress in the corner with weird stains on it. Plants growing in through a broken window. My eyes dart back and forth to take it all in, but my feet feel like they’re glued to the floor.

The guy appears, eventually. He climbs down a rickety wooden ladder, from a trapdoor in the ceiling. He’s bald and gaunt and tall, and wearing some kind of tailcoat. I get the feeling for a moment that he might be a tailor. Maybe they store old hats here, or something like that. But as he gets closer he starts grinning, with his head held slightly sideways, and I feel the hairs stand up on my neck. Back against the door. His skin is grey. His ears are too long. His eyes are too dark and vast.

“Welcome, welcome,” he says. He extends his hand for me to shake it, and I can’t remember ever wanting to do something less. His fingers are too long. He has a kind of ruffed sleeve thing going on, under his coat. Victorian. Or older.

“Oh, how foolish of me,” he says. “We can’t do that any more, can we? All of this coronavirus nonsense. World’s gone mad. Now, follow me over here and we’ll go through the orientation.”

And I do follow him, because I’m slightly scared of what will happen if I don’t. But then I realise what he said. Orientation. I thought this was just the interview, but he’s talking as though I’ve already got the job. That changes something, makes me smile, melts the lump of ice that had formed somewhere halfway down my spine. I see a spider the size of a mouse scuttling accross the floor, but suddenly that seems charming. Not a reason to leave. Maybe he’s just a bit eccentric. Nothing wrong with that.

On the far wall of the warehouse there’s a kind of crank-handle lever sticking out of the wall. It’s made of black wrought iron, with a wooden grip. Like a windlass or a ratchet, that you crank round and round. Maybe for opening a big garage door? But there aren’t any doors like that in here. Not that I can see.

The man with the long fingers stops next to it and smiles at me again. Showing me his sharpened teeth.

“I just need you to turn this handle,” he says.

I look at him sceptically. He doesn’t stop smiling. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that this might be seen as a strange request. This is when I ask him what it does, and he laughs at me.

“Never mind that,” he says. “Above your pay grade. All you need to do is turn it.”

I stand there for a moment, with questions dying in my throat. He blinks and smiles. Eventually there’s nothing left to do but reach out towards the handle.

“Erm,” I say. “Which way do I....clockwise, or anticlockwise?”

The man with the long fingers looks surprised. Uncertain. That only lasts for a moment, before the smile returns. “Whichever you prefer!”

I nod, and force myself to laugh. Then I wrap my left hand around the grip.

I don’t get electrocuted or teleported anywhere. The handle moves slightly, even with the slightest force. When I’m sure it’s safe, I take a good grip and start cranking it clockwise. Slowly and experimentally, at first. I get the feeling that it connects with something, on the other side of the wall. There are gears are turning, teeth meshing. Weights and counterweights moving. I can hear vague sounds, feel vague motions. There is a great mechanism of some kind.

The man with the long fingers is grinning even more widely. “There you are! Nothing to it. Keep doing that until, say, five o’ clock? How does that sound?”

“Erm,” I say. “Do I get a lunch break?”

“What? Oh! Yes, yes, I should think so. We all need to eat occassionally, don’t we? How long do you want?”

“H...how about an hour? From...half twelve?”

“Sounds very reasonable. Now I’ll be just upstairs, but I can’t imagine you’ll need me for anything! You’re already doing a wonderful job. I think you’ll fit right in, here. You keep going. See yourself out, when you’re done, won’t you? No need to lock up!”

That was the last time I saw him. He climbed back upstaurs and pulled the laddercup behind him. Closing the hatch. It’s stayed shut ever since.

So I kept cranking the handle, until about five o’ clock. I took an hour for lunch, in the middle. Went to a fancy sandwich bar. I thought about writing a Tweet, but part of me wanted to keep it secret. What if somebody else applied, took the job from me? I put the phone back in my pocket. Enjoyed my sandwich. Went back to work. Walked home with tired arms.

I spent that night staring at the ceiling of my flat and thinking very hard. I wrote a draft email to the guy, to tell him that the job wasn’t for me. I nearly sent it. But then I checked my bank account, and saw that my first month’s wages had already been paid.

It’s been a few weeks now, and I’m so glad I didn’t quit.

I think the best thing about it is that I don’t have to talk to anyone, all day. I can let my mind wander. I never worry that I’m doing it wrong, or that I might get caught shirking. I’m even getting a pretty good arm workout from it. When one arm gets tired I just turn around and face the other way and use the other arm for a while. My biceps look great. I’ve started wearing polo shirts more often. When I go for my lunch break and sit outside a cafe and eat my overpriced sandwich I find myself smiling, feeling the sun on my face. Brushing the cobwebs off my jeans.

It’s actually the most fulfilled I’ve felt in years.

#fiction #weird #surreal #scifi #covid #millenial

The vermodrome is dark and quiet in the early hours of the morning. Dragons curled up in their sheds and handlers sleeping in the long barrack huts with their leaky roofs. Nobody out on any midnight runs, tonight. So nobody to wait up for.

But Redge still can’t get any sleep. He leans against the side of Shed 5, smoking a cheap cigarette. There’s the smallest chance that an enemy flier could see the orange pinprick from a great height and use that to find the vermodrome, but he’s not seriously concerned about that. He can’t hear wingbeats in the air. Or the thrumbling drone of an engine, either.

It’s cold out here, even with the sheepskin jerkin. It’s cold in the huts, too. They were never built to last, these barrack huts. They were meant to be torn down and rebuilt somewhere else as the army moved north. But the army hasn’t moved north, yet. There’s no sign that it will move north any time soon. The Twergs are digging their heels in. So the army has to dig in opposite, shivering in the mud. And 7th Flight has to stay ten miles behind the lines, shivering in their huts.

The sheds are warmer. Double-walled and insulated. Dragons don’t do well in the cold.

He stamps out his cigarette in the mud, then goes in through the side door, rather than rolling the great barn doors open. That would let the cold air in.

There’s a dim orange light inside from the furnace smouldering in the corner. The toasty heat is welcome, on his face. He can vaguely make out the outlines of a great shape in the gloom, curled up in the centre of the shed. But he walks around the outskirts, heading for the furnace itself. Careful not to touch it without his gloves. It’s down to its embers now, so he opens the grille to try and get it going again. Poking and prodding at the ash. The grille always squeals on its hinges when it’s pushed wide open.

Slithering, behind him. Scales against straw.

“Didn’t mean to wake you,” he says.

“Excuse my scepticism,” says Agatha. He hears her voice inside his head. Not with his ears.

“No, I couldn’t sleep,” he says. “Thought I’d check the furnace hadn’t gone out.”

“It never goes out.”

“Even so.”

There’s wood piled next to the furnace. The whole army’s short of coal, so he sent

a work detail out into the forest with axes last week. He’s not sure what the Vracians would think, if they knew he was felling their sacred trees to keep his dragons warm. But then it’s the dragons keeping their forests from being invaded and burnt down, so that seems like a decent trade to him. He throws a few logs onto the fire and hears a tremendous sigh behind him. Feels a gust of hot breath on the back of his neck.

“Is it Lilian, again?” asks Agatha.

“No,” says Redge. “I told you, I’m just checking the furnaces.”

“It seems peculiar.”

He turns and scowls, with an armful of wood. Agatha is cast in shadow, with her scales barely catching the glow from the fire. But Redge can see a pair of eyes watching him, ancient and calculating in the darkness. And he can see two rows of teeth.

“What’s peculiar?” he asks.

“That the furnaces always require your special attention on nights where your marriage is in jeopardy.”

“Bollocks,” says Redge. “That’s not true.”

“I have yet to be proven wrong.”

“I just thought I’d make sure you were warm enough, is all.”

“How considerate.”

When the wood is on the fire and the flames are climbing, he swings the grille shut again. He sets the poker down and rubs his hands together. Then he stands where he is and scratches his left earlobe. “Although now that you mention it…”

Agatha sighs, again.

There’s a kettle in the shed, and a box of teabags. He heats the water over the furnace and makes himself a brew, talking while he does it. The teapot always goes down on the straw near Agatha, with the lid off, so she can inhale the vapour. And he sits down on a rickety old chair. He’s got to the nub of the problem, by then.

“…she just doesn’t seem to realise,” he’s saying. “That I can’t talk to her on the phone every bloody day. Because there’s only one telephone line that runs out here, and it’s for official purposes. I can’t go up to Major Caelborn and say, ‘Beg pardon, sir, I know you’re waiting for word from brigade headquarters, but I was hoping I could call the missus quickly, if it’s all right with you.’ But there’s no telling her that.”

“You spoke to her once, on her birthday, did you not?”

“Well, aye, I did. But that’s different. I told him then, ‘It’s the wife’s birthday’, and he let me have five minutes on the blower. He’s not made of stone. But that were a special occasion. I can’t do it every day, can I?”

“Humans never cease to amaze me,” says Agatha. “This telephone. It does not seem to have brought happiness into the world. It seems to me that letters were sufficient, for many centuries. And now they have been made insufficient. But no good has come from it.”

“Well that’s just the thing,” he says. “Letters aren’t good enough anymore. And she says that if I am going to send letters then she wants more detail. But I can’t put any detail in! Everything gets censored. Comes back from the major’s office with half of it crossed out.”

“Perhaps she simply worries about you,” says Agatha. “Details might be comforting to her. Without them, she is free to imagine your situation as being worse than it actually is.”

“I suppose that must be it,” he says. He takes another slurp of tea. Part of him feels daft, talking to a dragon about problems with the missus. But who else does he have to talk to? He can’t talk to the handlers, because he’s their flight sergeant. They’re supposed to look up to him. The other NCOs on the base aren’t much use for this sort of thing. And he can’t talk to officers, because they’re above his paygrade. They’re not supposed to treat him as an equal.

Besides, he likes talking to Aggie. She always knows how to make him feel better, for all of her sighing and complaining. You’re bound to know something about everything, aren’t you? When you’re three thousand years old.

“It must be distressing for her,” says Agatha. “Knowing that you could come to harm.”

“Pfft,” he says. “What harm? Not like I’m in the front lines. Been here five months now and I’ve not seen head nor tail of the Twergs. I’m starting to think they’re imaginary.”

“I can assure you that they’re not,” says Agatha. She shifts in the gloom and unfurls her right wing. Sheets of gauzy skin stretching over delicate bones. Between the third and fourth flight-fingers there’s a ragged hole punched through the membrane, which Redge could just about fit his thumb through if he wanted to. It’s healing up slowly, but it will leave a nasty white scar. It still makes him seethe. Some bold-faced Twerg taking a pot-shot at her with his rifle. The bloody nerve.

“Well that’s what you get for flying too low,” he says. “Ought to be more careful.”

“It was Falinor’s idea,” she says. “Not mine.”

Redge grumbles to himself. “Well he definitely ought to be more careful.”

Agatha lowers her wing, again. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”

“No, nothing,” he says. “Still on leave. Or that’s what they say.”

They share a moment of sad silence before Redge decides to leave her in peace. He knocks back the rest of his tea and stands up, patting his pockets. “Well,” he says. “Can’t stay here jawing all night. Ought to be going.”

“Be patient with your wife, Redge,” says Agatha. “I’m sure she’s just concerned for your wellbeing.”

“Glad somebody is.”

He closes up Shed 5 and toddles back to bed, past the leaky handler’s barrack and the leaky officer’s mess to the leaky NCO’s hut. There’s only two other men who share it with him: Cob Davies, the Quartermaster Sergeant, and Sergeant Major Gurnbad, who snores like a coping saw. Redge rams cotton wool into his ears before he climbs into bed. Shivering under the covers. Thinking about being back home, with Lilian. Part of him would like to go and make his bunk in Shed 5, with Aggie. Curl up in the straw, near the furnace. It would be a lot warmer. He tries to imagine that while he falls asleep.