Saga
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Preface
Chapter 1 - A GHOST IN THE CITY
Chapter 2 - MALL RAIDERS
Chapter 3 - MAYHEM AND MAGIC
Chapter 4 - LOOKING AT THE STARS
Chapter 5 - INFECTION
Chapter 6 - GOING UNDERGROUND
Chapter 7 - THE BIRTH OF DEFIANCE
Chapter 8 - DEATH AND THE MAIDEN
Chapter 9 - THE DEFIANCE MANIFESTO
Chapter 10 - PRELUDE TO A PARTY
Chapter 11 - DANGEROUS WATERS
Chapter 12 - REFUTATION AND THE BOOT
Chapter 13 - REPROGRAMMED AUTONOMOUS LIFEFORMS
Chapter 14 - ADDICTION
Chapter 15 - A TANK AFLOAT
Chapter 16 - BLASTIMUS MAXIMUS
Chapter 17 - DEATH ON A BLACK AIRBIKE
Chapter 18 - THE SETTING OF A TRAP
Chapter 19 - HESLINGTON HOUSE
Chapter 20 - A LONG REACH
Chapter 21 - ONE STEP BEYOND
Chapter 22 - THE ASSASSIN WHO WOULD BE KING
Chapter 23 - ALLIANCE
Chapter 24 - THE BROKEN-WINGED BUTTERFLY
Chapter 25 - STORMING THE AIRWAVES
Chapter 26
Chapter 27 - HUMILIATION
Chapter 28 - REVENGE IS BEST SERVED HOT
Chapter 29 - FLICKERING LIGHT
Chapter 30 - THE TASTE OF VICTORY
Chapter 31 - ACROSS THE UNIVERSES
Chapter 32 - SCATTERED ORCHIDS
Chapter 33 - RAGE AND DESPAIR
Chapter 34 - WAX BEFORE FIRE
Chapter 35 - THE STARS
“You don’t have spells in this world, right?” asked Cindella.
“What are you talking about?” Carter was furious, his anger driven by fear. It was one thing to be in prison for a bit of spray painting, but being associated with the murder of a cop was a terminal offense.
“No, I guess not. Here, then, you’d better drink some of this.” Cindella passed around a semi-transparent flask that seemed to be made of thousands of emeralds. “It’s invisibility potion.”
“Great.” The others looked on with disbelief but I took my swig with confidence. They hadn’t seen those lasers bounce off her.
“Whoa!” Nathan jumped back, staring at me. “She’s gone.”
Being invisible was sweet. Even better was to walk out through a cordon of armed police, while their guns were trained on the station door. What a giddy feeling. This was truly punk.
FIREBIRD
WHERE SCIENCE FICTION SOARS™
FIREBIRD
Published by the Penguin Group
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Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Copyright © Conor Kostick, 2006, 2008
All rights reserved
THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:
Kostick, Conor.
Saga / by Conor Kostick.
p. cm.
Summary: On Saga, a world based on a video role-playing game, fifteen-year-old
Ghost lives to break rules, but the Dark Queen who controls Saga plans to
enslave its people and that of New Earth, and Ghost and her airboarding
friends, along with Erik and his friends from Epic, try to stop her.
eISBN : 978-1-101-16289-7
[1. Fantasy games—Fiction. 2. Role playing—Fiction. 3. Video games—Fiction.
4. Kings, queens, rulers, etc.—Fiction. 5. Science Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.K85298Sag 2008 [Fic]—dc22 2007032175
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
to Andrew
Preface
CONTACT
All motion ceased. A Communication-Assassination probe gradually awoke from a dream in which it had been submerged far beneath deep arctic waters. Barely ten million kilometers away, a star was blazing with uncomfortable brightness. The probe slid filters over its sensors, the first action it had taken in a hundred and fourteen years, five months, three days, seventeen hours, and forty-four seconds. It conjectured that a human being waking up to a bright morning and reaching for sunglasses would feel exactly the same as the probe did now. Once the filters were up, the star became a more soothing green, with attractive layers of dark and light turquoise, created by ribbons of helium nuclei writhing violently through plasma to explode from the surface, giving heat and light to the nearby worlds. It was a nice star, a lot like the Sun, and the probe felt a momentary pang of homesickness for the Solar System. But there was work to be done.
The probe searched for the space-com line. There it was, faint but comfortingly steady. A buzzing of information, a bundle of waves that were refocused and boosted a thousand times between this distant star and Earth. The probe slotted itself into place, conscious of the honor of being the final link in the chain. A momentary burst of seemingly random information as its communications protocol adjusted to the pulsating flow, then a log-in screen. Password confirmed, secret password reconfirmed. Then a lengthy process of file updating. Much had happened during its travels. The total download was likely to take over a day, so the probe used the time to scout.
Safety first.
After a week, the probe was satisfied there was no threat. In fact, the surprising feature of the planet, called New Earth by its rather unimaginative human colonists, was that its sophisticated data-processing system was all but shut down. A bit like having a computer but using it only to play card games. Strange, but not threatening. In fact, the opposite. The task looked easy. Too easy.
Having received confirmation from base 7C13 on Earth, the probe prepared for the assimilation and destruction of New Earth’s central computer system. And precisely at this moment, it got the giggles. All the time—decades—and all the expense to which the Dark Queen had gone, in order to locate and absorb this far-flung colony: it all came down to this moment. And the probe, despite the fact that it was being monitored, perhaps, indeed, because at some level it sensed the frightening presence of the Dark Queen, found the moment too funny. It had never been in such a position before, that so much collective effort depended on its own actions. The probe felt giddy. Like it was on the edge of a black hole a moment from annihilation.
After twenty-seven seconds spent indulging in this unusual sensation, the probe became sober again.
It took the plunge. Advance programs stormed all the major entry points so that giant files could pour down uninterrupted into New Earth’s system, reworking them, reshaping them, aligning them with the Earth’s own system. Every individual characteristic of the old system was destroyed. Layer upon layer of script w
as rewritten from the very bottom of its hardware. The probe was pleased. Nothing now could stop the assimilation, nothing short of the human beings physically destroying the apparatus on the planet, and they probably had no idea that inside their communications system a revolution was taking place. The computer world of Epic had been erased, and replaced by Saga.
There was only one, very minor, source of irritation. One infinitesimally small packet of data had been made so integral to the planet’s system that it was impossible to destroy it without making the whole system unstable. The data contained in that packet was far too small to matter; it certainly was not a counter-program or a virus of any sort. Only a perfectionist like the probe would even care that a vestige of the old system lingered on, like the appendix of the human being, an indication of an earlier stage of evolution. The label on the packet made no sense either; instead of the usual core systems symbols, there were just two words, like a human name.
Cindella Dragonslayer.
With a shrug, the probe continued its work, slightly disappointed that the takeover had been so unchallenging, but pleased all the same.
Chapter 1
A GHOST IN THE CITY
My first memory is very distinct: a suited man in an old raincoat leans over me, his harsh face softened by an expression of concern. Far above us, black drops of water from a recent shower gather on stone gables. They swell and reluctantly, one after the other, fall through the dark sky.
“Are you all right, little girl?”
“I’m fine.” I remember being a little embarrassed that I had been lying on the wet pavement, but even more ashamed that I hadn’t the faintest idea who I was.
“Well.” He hesitates; his gray eyes become distant. “In that case, I have to go.”
“That’s fine, fine.” I wave him on. “Thank you. For stopping to ask.”
That’s it. I suppose I was about nine years old at the time. I was in a state of total confusion, wondering if perhaps I’d just been in an accident and lost my memory; searching the emptiness in my head for clues: my name, my family, anything.
The dark girl reflected in the tinted window of a nearby aircar, that was me—I recognized the image; yet, frighten-ingly, I felt for a moment that she was a complete stranger. In that instant, I made at least one discovery about myself, which was that I was a thief. Without my even thinking about it, my hands had slipped inside the kind man’s jacket, stolen his wallet, and checked out the contents. He had a yellow pass card, which was classier than he looked.
“Mister!” I called out to him. “Here, you dropped this.”
A thief with a conscience.
So, here I was, about six years later, and still no closer to knowing who I was. Still wondering why I couldn’t recall anything that had happened from when I was young, or even who my parents were.
Right now, I was riding the nose of my airboard, which might not be the most impressive stunt to look at, but for anyone who knows airboards, it’s class. You see, all the thrust comes from the back of an airboard, so most of the time your weight needs to be on your back foot. It’s very hard to steer with your feet side by side, toes just over the front of the board, arms outstretched, hair tugged by the wind. Hard, because shifting your weight around by a tiny amount causes you to veer wildly. But hey, if you are good, you can direct the board with the swaying of your arms. And I was good. Actually, I was the best.
Airboards work a lot like two magnets of the same polarity, the way they push each other apart. When an airboard is switched on, it is repelled by matter. So left to itself an airboard will float about half a meter off the ground, bobbing slightly. Fitted with a drive, it becomes your best way of getting around the City. We liked to ride pretty high, but you can go only so long through the air before you start to fall; then you need to find a solid object to slide over that will give you the uphit to rise again. Boarding is the greatest fun you can have in this world. There are plenty of railings, ledges, walls, and cars, moving or parked, to let you dance through the shadows of the City, riding the beat of one uphit after another, flitting erratically like a bat above the heads of the staring walkers.
I took an uphit from a parked car to come out of the nose ride, moving fast toward the factory. My next move was going to be a one eighty off a windowsill, and I needed my right foot back on the tail of the board. Somewhere down in the parking lot, my friends were watching and admiring.
With a screech, the window opened, and a security guard thrust out his helmeted face. “Beat it, kid!”
“Watch out, Ghost!” someone cried from below.
There was no time to pull out of my move. With a snarl, I tried to get some of the downhit from my board to smack the guard’s face as well as the ledge. He saw it coming and, at full stretch, he punched out at me with a wooden baton. My board twisted under my feet and spun away through the air. I was falling. About five meters above the tarmac.
They tell you at the front of every airboard manual that you have to wear a helmet. Then they tell you again. And just in case you don’t get the message, they tell you once more. Only after that do they tell you how to ride your new airboard. But I hadn’t learned much from manuals, just one fascinating fact. A drop to concrete from above ten meters will kill you; that’s pretty obvious. But did you know that there is a death zone created by falling from an airboard headfirst at exactly five meters above the ground? This is because for most people, the one second it takes you to fall doesn’t give you time to get your head out of the way. Funnily enough if you fall from a bit higher, you are actually safer; you might only break a leg.
On the other hand, one second isn’t so bad if you know what you are doing.
I launched a desperate adrenaline-fueled kick, intercepting the middle strap of the board with my left foot, with just enough momentum to swing the board right around over my head, so from my friends’ point of view it would have looked as if I had performed a midair cartwheel, bringing the board back beneath me, inches above the ground.
A fierce jolt of pain shot up my left leg, as if a giant pair of crocodile clips had been shut around my ankle and a switch thrown. I let out a scream of distress and anger as the board and I rebounded back up into the air from our drop. My ankle was probably twisted. But I was furious now and, ignoring the pain, drove the board back into the wall, using its carbon steel edge to cut into the surface of the bricks. Orange dust and the reek of ozone surrounded me, as the thrust of my engine fought the desire of wall and board to push each other apart. Just before the strain burned out my motor, I finished my attack on the factory frontage and looped away, coasting now from aircar roof to aircar roof. One glance over my shoulder confirmed that my writing had been as neat as always. A perfect ♥ about two meters tall. My calling card. See, I told you I was good.
The factory doors opened and three more security guards ran out, shouting and brandishing their batons. My friends hurriedly ducked under the straps of their satchels and buckled their helmets tight. We fled into the amber evening with a motion of sinuous lines and sharp cutbacks, like a flock of starlings.
We had to stick to single file on the main routeway that was Fourth Street, some of the others performing tricks along a power cable down the center aisle. But as the gang scattered into the pedestrian-only Fourier Avenue, on my right I caught a glance of fashionably ripped jeans and a screaming red T-shirt. Jay had come alongside me and we rode the bollards together, bouncing up, then gliding down toward the next as though we were cresting a series of waves.
“You all right? That mudgrubber knew exactly what he was doing. He could have really hurt you.”
“Yeah.” I didn’t say anything about the throbbing ache in my ankle. Thinking about it brought tears to my eyes, but I wasn’t going to show any weakness in front of Jay. He was the oldest of our gang and our leader. Between Jay and me was a friendship, but also a rivalry. I’m sure he disliked the fact that I was a better boarder than he was, and, punk though he was, he just could not bring h
imself to match my self-confidence by boarding without a helmet.
“Good.” He glanced across at me. “I thought you were going down that time.”
“Yeah, it was close. But I caught it. No worries.”
Turning into Turner Square was a pleasure, lots of easy riding along the tops of the tidy bushes and plenty of room for the walkers to get out of our way. Then a number of climbs: the Castleford Hotel’s convenient awning; a series of window ledges; a grind along a power cable; an ollie to get that extra bit of height you needed to take you up to the stone ornaments of an ancient government building; finally we rode along the lamps that beamed light up onto a huge billboard, currently selling a popular brand of toothpaste. As we came between the beams of light and the board, we were casting fleeting dark shadows like cavities on a whiter-than-white smile, so gigantic were the teeth. A quick glance and, having checked the sky was clear of surveillance choppers, a sharp cutback. We were gone.
Behind the billboard was a disused office, and this was our den.
Chapter 2
MALL RAIDERS
Our den was class. It had once been a grade-orange workplace, with a million glowing threads of energy flowing in and out of a wide rectangular space. Imagine an open-plan office, ablaze with metallic-white strip lights and noisy with the hubbub of workers, buzzing like suited bees as they got up from their swivel chairs, talking all the while into their headsets. Time is money. I bet they didn’t even pause to flirt by the water dispensers. This wide space was dark now; the only sound an occasional fluttering of pigeon wings. The windows were fastened up tight with shutters, sealing out any natural daylight. That is, apart from a broken one, which first the pigeons and now our boarder gang used to get in.
Jay discovered the room and the first time he showed it to us, we simply thought we had found ourselves an indoor board zone. Our combat-dressed pair of friends, Carter and Milan, were strong lads; they had no bother dragging around filing cabinets and tables to make a stunt course, with lots of ramps for lift and half walls for cutbacks. It turned out, however, that the roof was just a little too low for our best tricks. And anyway, it wasn’t long before the toilets and the kitchen area were discovered; amazingly they were still connected to running water. We all instantly realized the possibilities. So now, as a precaution, the four interior doors to the rest of the building were heavily barricaded, in order that we could have this vast room for ourselves. It had been our den for the past three months.