:: BROKEN COUNTRY[DECRYPTION] ::
ENTRY LOG // INCIDENT: DISK COUNTER-INCURSION
DATE: 2047-11-17
LOCATION: The Tower, Sector Gamma-9 (Broken Country Grid 56X)
PERSONNEL: Dr. David John Roden
The Tower had metal struts supporting a triangular pediment for bundles of parabolic dishes, cables, and antennas. Its appearance as cellular mast was, of course, a loose translation, ineradicable polysemy, Bilderstürmerei – truest rendering desiccating Imago Dei and its fragile analogies.
Claudia removed her armour. I unclasped the overjacket, opened the blister as waves of Dis soiled us. (Malina and Map had formulated the DisK Basis… The armour wasn’t a physical barrier but a semiotic counter-incursion.)
We became dizzy and tenuous, unable to follow the report from the TAC about a swarm in the hitherto scattered motilities. A Sniper walked gingerly to the end of the roof, cameras trained on the neighboring Lot where faint orange coils flowed in the night air while his partner, the Spotter, tried to interpret the contrary indices scrolling down his HUD. The coils drifting, flowering from cracks in corrugated metal in the alleyway beyond, moving between the cars, undulance interpolated between … Something was coming. Something is always coming in Broken Country.
The Spotter’s drones dropped flares. Footage shows a concreted area bale lit; autowrecks, plastic garden furniture, a tangle of scaffolding; store mannequins, imaginary genitalia scrawled in red marker and knotted to the steel sections with barbed wire, meat rotting under plastic, an inflatable pool and plastic diving board.
Then the eye fixates on threshing fervid movement, fur, flesh and bone assemblages, verminous and crawling …
Something bigger pounded the rickety fence as if a sea were breaking in. Sensoria glitched as we faded into the Outside. The flares burned out or were smothered. The Sniper laid down suppression mortars with tiny splines prompting harsh metal screams from a different air … Something being shredded alive. ‘Do what the fuck you’re going to do’ , he yelled as Spotter joined him.…
Something still.
Dust and car parts bloomed from below as the drones deployed their spline, napalm and shard grenades. Shattered paving and earth rain. The Tower flattened onto my visual field like cartoon spider; dying, peeling away, expressing logical densities beyond imagination as quantity acquired the milk of quality. Just as Map predicted, they were q-mining us from the Outside.
The sounds of urban war muffled black iridescences, phenomenal foam.
Something coming.
More precisely, returning.
Sequestrated splines had crept under Spotter’s armour like lice and detonated, cooking him under its shell. The CommNet violent with his screams as he cartwheeled, toppling off the roof, too damaged, I hoped, to be accepted by the whisper matrices of despoiled flesh and heterogene bone. The Sniper and other Rakehell were nowhere to be seen.
I sensed the sequestering intellect training its flamer on me. Claudia beside me on the composites in a seizure, lips blue, foam-flecked, eyes scleral. I closed mine tight hoping it wouldn’t burn me …
Then a particle lance split the night with incandescence, vaporising the Rakehell’s delicate body. A slight figure in DisK Mage grey had clambered up the ladder holding an improbably heavy lance. Her face had the elfin symmetry of a revisionary screen idol: Anna before xenografting/death. She hefted the big particle cannon nimbly, grinning the shit at me as she walked to the edge, trainrf the weapon down in the Lot.
Actinic blue blanking the screen; white phosphor scars in vision, more torn metal screams reverberate from those other spaces.
She dropped the exhausted weapon to inscribe a tabula of the Grey Redoubts in the air. Fresh waves of Dis nauseated me as I crawled, looked over the edge. This was a Kaos flux; coronas incipient around Anna’s hands; waves of hyper-entropy battened on the seething pond like maggots, eating reconstituted fabulae of bone and fur, tentacle and machine; rhizome-stitched, orchestrated…
Its patina still lapped at the foot of the Parts Warehouse, but the Grey Fell was rotting and hurting it metaphysically in ways mere mechanical damage could not. I watched it recede like an outgoing tide of vomit towards the enclosing corrugated fence.
Anna kneeled above me, her sharp cheek bones inscribed in the rotting radiance of the Fell: ‘Jon, this is not an Intrusion by-blow. Something was designed long ago, but not here. It might have disconnected from an original world-integument, which was why Chief ordered me in.
You’re welcome by the way…’