Saga

Table of Contents

 

“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
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.

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 was 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.

With a shrug, the probe continued its work, slightly disappointed that the takeover had been so unchallenging, but pleased all the same.

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.