Imogen had been in the room when Bianca first broached to Cymbeline her suggestion that, in testing the might of an army, it would be a good idea to use an expendable first-wave unit. She had suggested it be composed of foreigners, Nevadan gamblers or Orgegonian outlaws, perhaps. People with nothing to lose and everything to gain. They could be offered huge monetary awards for allowing themselves to be drafted, awards which wouldn't have to be paid if the soldiers didn't survive the battle.
Kind-hearted though she was, Imogen, listening at her father's side, had thought it sounded like a good idea. Honest enough; the soldiers in question couldn't help being aware of the risks they were signing up for. It hadn't seemed to her any crueler to risk the lives of foreigners than the lives of Californians, and after all, a first wave had to be run by someone.
Still, seeing the plan put into action, and knowing that the men and women who crossed the chasm and rushed the Minuteman army, an army fronted by the powerful, immovable Mormon guard, she couldn't help being sickened with pity at the thought that these people had had no real choice in joining California's army. The promised reward was too great, and the lives they were leaving behind, too bleak, for them to refuse a chance to participate in this gruesome lottery. Hell, she knew that as well as anyone, and she'd only lived in the wastes a few months.
A tear came to her eye at the sight of the first brave soldier to cross the chasm. He leapt at almost the same time he fired his grappling hook, and both armies held their breaths, waiting to see if his weight would pull the line off-target before it had a chance to impale the opposite cliff-wall.
It didn't; he lived, and climbed out, and every weapon in the Arizona army leveled itself at him.
They didn't fire, not yet, because they were waiting for Imogen and General Lloyd to run back behind the front line.
Once they had, the counter-attack began, and Imogen had her first taste of battle.
The California army liked to arrange itself on the battlefield in organized, pretty formations. Footsoldiers here, cavalry here, tanks positioned at regular intervals, larger, distance weapons at the back. Straight lines, squares, something that could be easily diagrammed.
Not so with the Minutemen. They were an unorganized mass, a collection of men of all shapes and sizes, in varying levels of clothedness. Minutemen made their own armor, brought and modified their own weapons. Their training was mostly a matter of learning chants and patriotic yells, and only the most basic battlefield orders – attack, retreat, move north/south/east/west, fire, take cover.
So the first wave of Californians who rushed them had as good a chance of being vaporized as being shot; of being frozen as being electrocuted. The order, attack, was given, and the Minutemen rushed forward in a chaotic cloud of roaring, popping, zapping, banging, whistling, bristling weapons. Imogen was swept right along, with only a sidearm and a knife, and through the rising dust cloud she saw, within twenty seconds, enough horror to give her a lifetime of nightmares.
Ten feet away, a Californian soldier took a chestful of late-detonating explosive gel. She just had time to look down and register horror – to scramble at her golden uniform coat, trying to free herself of the heavy, sticky blob – and then it went, spraying her ribcage and one shoulder into a gory circle. The soldier lived a few seconds, seconds possibly as traumatizing to Imogen, the sole witness, as they were to her, and she fell over, clacking her jaw in a voiceless scream.
Whole sections of ground began to explode as cannons behind the lines started up. How they were aiming, Imogen had no idea; they seemed as likely to hit the Arizonans as the Californians.
Now the condors were joining the fight; a man to Imogen's left was swept off his horse, carried into the air by a talon hooked through his neck, kicking and bleeding.
His horse ran on. Into the Chasm. It was the first victim of the mercury lava that day, and Imogen never forgot its death-shriek. Nor the scent of its roasted flesh.
Around her, bodies were flying apart, and each death she saw was worse than the last. There was a huge Minuteman, a meteor crater giant even bigger than Lloyd, who would pick a Californian, stomp on his foot so he couldn't run away, then calmly, and none too quickly, pull his head off, sometimes with the spine still attached. Crowds ran from him, but once he picked out a target, that target, no matter how fast they ran or how hard they squealed, couldn't escape.
The Mormons had broken into shorter lines; each line pulled an energy ball into the air, though they were smaller than the ones used in the initial attack. The balls crossed the chasm, and were going to work on California's large weapons – the tanks, the catapults, the laser cannons.
Still, Imogen noted through the rising haze, they didn't seem to be doing as much damage as she would have predicted. It seemed that the energy balls were reduced in energy, as well as size, when they were created by smaller groups of Mormons.
And for all their strength, they couldn't stay in a single line. They weren't invincible, nor immovable.
She saw one Mormon die – a lavender-haired male. Ten Californians focused all their energy on him. They knocked him out of line with a nano-blaster, which gave him a good shock but didn't kill him. He rose, anger shining on his angelic face, and engaged them hand-to-hand… or rather, hand-to-knife, as he was unarmed and they weren't.
He took down half of them and injured two others, but finally, he fell; a tall soldier emptied a machine gun into his head.
The head wasn't blown off; Mormon bones, it seemed, were hard as granite; but even granite could be blown apart if shot repeatedly at close range, and once the brain was exposed, the Mormon let out a bit of birdsong and went down.
The shooter was the man who had first crossed the Chasm, the brave soldier who should have died the second he cleared the cliff face. Luck, it seemed, was on his side. Imogen knew him by the bloody streaked handprints on his shirt. She couldn't see his face; he wore a helmet with a lowered guard.
Still, she could tell he saw her, and was coming at her.
She went for her sidearm, which she stupidly hadn't pulled until now. All her attention had been devoted to staying by General Lloyd's side, which he had told her was her only duty in the battle.
It wasn't appropriate, he'd said, for her to stay out of the fight. She was a soldier now, the same as hundreds of others, and must do her best. But her priority was to stay near him. He would protect her if he could. She was to shoot at anyone targeting Lloyd's horse.
Her arm came up, but her grip on the gun was weak; she'd have missed even if she had a chance to pull the trigger, which she didn't. The soldier with the bloody handprints had knocked the pistol from her hand in half a second, and his empty machine gun was in the air, ready to come down on her head. Imogen felt, instead of fear, a kind of cold, logical relief. She was going to die an ordinary death – being hit in the head. She wasn't going to explode, be melted, boil in mercury or be hacked to death by a screaming energy ball.
The soldier's gun hovered.
Then Imogen found herself knocked, not to death, but simply aside; the soldier, who was the same height as herself, but made entirely of muscle and sinew, had brushed past her, digging his shoulder into her chest hard enough to put her on the ground, but not hard enough to damage her.
He was aiming for Lloyd; already, he had wrangled himself half-up onto the saddle, and was attacking her master with his makeshift club.
Luckily, Lloyd, being a crater giant, could take a few blows from a machine gun. Bullets could take him down, but not human strength – not even the strength of this obvious madman, who, finding the general didn't collapse, hit him faster and harder, wailing a battle cry.
The sudden brush with death, and reprieve from it, startled Imogen into mental clarity. The first few minutes of the battle had been a chaotic film-reel of scenes from various nightmares. A slide show of death and destruction, explosions, tears and chaos.
Now she realized she wasn't an audience member; she was a participant, with a job to do. Specifically, her job was to protect General Lloyd. The man who had been so kind to her. Who was now in danger of losing his seat to this magnificent, but crazed, Californian wildman.
Imogen found her knife. Found, also, the wildman's back, pointed right at her. She could see his muscles moving under the cloth. He wore no body armor, not even a Kevlar vest. Stupidly, Imogen thought about running to tell her father about the embarrassing state of his army. But he already knew, didn't he? There he was, on the other side of the chasm, overlooking the battle with a tight frown.
Well, she was dressed as a man. Time to act like one.
The blade was only four inches long, and, having been forged over campfire coals in Utah, neither sharp nor strong.
Sharp enough to go in, at least. It took all her strength and a running start, but she got the blade in. On the left side of his back; she was aiming for the heart.
The knife broke off inside the man, and Imogen was left staring, shocked, at the suddenly light handle.
She'd just killed a man.
A Californian, no less.
The man had been on Lloyd's horse, and now his weight slumped backwards; he fell on Imogen, and instinctively, she caught him, tried to bring him gently to the ground.
But he wasn't dead yet. The second his feet hit the ground, he recovered his strength, and, like a wounded animal, turned, lashing out wildly. His elbow caught Imogen's eye socket, and there was an explosion in her head, the sound of breaking glass. Then his fist came around to the other side of her face, once, twice, and she found herself staring up at the sky, a wild collection of dirt clouds, energy balls, flying bullets and mercurial steam.
There was blood in her eyes; she couldn't hear anything.
She saw the indefatigable soldier's running back, trickling blood from the wound she'd inflicted. The blade must still be inside him, but he was up and fighting, unlike her. Her entire face was broken. A tooth sat on the back of her tongue. Already, swelling was setting in, and she knew that in minutes, she would be unable to see out of either eye, or to move her broken jaw.
The pain was so sudden, so shocking, it sent her outside herself, in an almost near-death experience. Consciousness wavered; for a moment, she seemed to be outside her body, looking down at the damage, and raising her eyebrows in surprise and regret that anyone so thoroughly pulped could still be alive.
Dimly, she was aware of Lloyd pulling her onto the back of his saddle. Heard him grunt, "Jesus, Dusty. Oh, god, stay with me."
She felt her arms wrap around his broad chest, and felt him tying her hands together. It was, she realized, to keep her from falling off the horse.
Don't waste your time, she wanted to tell him. Fight. Protect yourself.
But she couldn't speak, and at last, couldn't see anything but the navy cloth on Lloyd's endless field of a back, and couldn't hear anything but the homogenous white noise of battle.