The girl glared at Jonah and Sam suspiciously as they stepped out of their plane.
‘Where is Axel Kavanaugh?’ she asked in an accent Jonah had never heard before. She was young, younger than Jonah, and he guessed she was an Aboriginal Australian, descended from the earliest occupants of this continent.
‘I’m Sam Kavanaugh, and this is Jonah Delacroix.’ ‘My name is Kala. But where is Axel?’
Sam explained that Axel wasn’t coming and why. ‘My people agreed to join Axel,’ Kala said. ‘Not two children.’
Jonah couldn’t believe she was calling them children, but moreover, he thought she could have shown some sympathy for Sam’s situation.
‘The elders will reconsider the deal,’ Kala grumbled as she led Jonah and Sam to two bizarre vehicles. Jonah had never seen anything like them before. They looked like hybrids of racing cars, boats and rockets. Their shiny metallic bodies were long and narrow, and low to the ground, reflecting the red dirt underneath. They each had four giant wheels and ten-metre-tall, fin-shaped sails rising from behind their cockpits.
A driver was waiting in one of the strange vehicles. Kala waved him away as she, Jonah and Sam climbed into the other.
A moment later they were gliding across the desert. Jonah was impressed by their speed, given that he could hear no engines.
‘This is amazing,’ he said. ‘We’re sailing on land!’
‘A land yacht,’ Sam added. ‘No petrol to worry about. It’s brilliant!’
‘The wind is a great gift,’ Kala explained cryptically.
They were seated one behind the other. From behind Jonah, Sam said, ‘Kala’s tribe has a fleet of these things. They’re crucial to our plans.’
Two dozen people came to greet the land yacht as it sailed into the village. The majority of these were Aborigines too. Jonah guessed that few of the Guardians’ supporters further away in the cities would have had the means to get here in time.
The crowd reacted with dismay, as Kala had, to find that their long-awaited allies were two teenagers. Jonah could hardly blame them. Sensing their discontent, and worried that they might abandon the mission, Sam stood on the bow of the land yacht and addressed them all.
‘I apologise for my father’s absence,’ she said. ‘I wish he could be with us too. But Jonah and I are here in Axel’s place, and our objective has not changed.’
A murmur of doubt shot through the crowd, but Sam continued undaunted.
‘Thirty-six hours from now, we will cleanse Uluru.
We will remove the men who occupy its heart and taint its soul.’
Jonah didn’t know what she was talking about. What was ‘Uluru’? He was impressed, however, at how confident Sam sounded, how in control.
Kala just scowled. ‘We have heard these promises before,’ she said.
‘I know,’ said Sam. ‘I know you have, but—’
‘You promised Uluru will be restored to its rightful owners. That is why my people agreed to join you in this fight.’
‘And that is still our intention,’ said Sam. ‘My father told you that when we met in the virtual world. Although... Some things have changed, and it may now take a little longer than we thought before we can—’
The crowd didn’t like that. Feeling he ought to help somehow, Jonah spoke up: ‘Sam means what she says. You can trust her.’
‘Uluru will be yours again,’ said Sam. ‘That hasn’t changed, I swear to you.’
‘We will trust you,’ said Kala, speaking authoritatively. ‘For now.’
The rest of the crowd followed her lead, and the crowd dispersed with only a few more grumbles of discontent. Kala and a few others stayed back, and took Jonah and Sam to see more of their land yachts, which were in the process of having odd, metal contraptions fitted to their backs. Jonah couldn’t tell what they were, at first. It took him a moment to work out what they were.
‘Sam, are those...catapults?’
‘You didn’t think we’d be going in through the front door, did you?’ Jonah realised he didn’t know what the plan was.
Jonah had been glad to get inside, out of the desert sun. Outside, he and Sam had seen boarded-up stores, squash courts, a police station. They had been taken by one of Kala’s people past these and shown into a white, clapboard house. The house was unfurnished, but sheets and pillows had been left in each of its four rooms. One room each for Jonah and Sam. Two more for Axel and Bradbury.
‘What is this place?’ asked Jonah.
‘It’s called Woomera,’ said Sam. ‘They used to test
rockets here, far away from any city. They built a village for the base’s workers. But it’s been abandoned for decades.’
‘So, now Kala’s people live here?’ said Jonah.
‘Some of them,’ said Sam, distracted. ‘Can you see a computer terminal?’ She had been hunting around the downstairs room of the house as they talked.
‘I have to get online. My dad—’
‘I don’t think there’s any power,’ said Jonah. ‘I tried turning on the air-conditioning in my room, but nothing happened. There’s no water either.’
‘I should have realised,’ Sam muttered. ‘Woomera would have been disconnected from the grid when they closed it down. They wouldn’t even have fitted terminals here, so long ago.’
‘Then how did Axel meet them online?’ asked Jonah. ‘They must have access, somewhere.’
She pushed past him, and ran out of the house.
Jonah followed her. The sun was going down, the shadows of the clapboard buildings growing longer. It took Jonah a moment to realise where Sam was heading – back to the land yachts. They were far, far newer than the village, and Jonah guessed, as Sam did, that they would have satellite uplinks.
Two mechanics were still working on the yachts, fixing the last of the catapults to them. When Sam explained what she wanted, they were happy to oblige her. But the first terminal she tried wouldn’t boot up; apparently, its battery was charged by the rotation of the land yacht’s wheels and had run flat.
Soon, however, Sam was seated inside a second cockpit, and plugged in.
Jonah watched over her slumped body as she meta- tranced, unsure of his surroundings and not knowing what else to do with himself. He hoped that no one would start asking him questions. He should have talked to Sam more in the plane, he thought, and found out some of the answers.
Sam was gone for almost an hour. Jonah didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one. It was dark now, and he was still waiting when Kala came running out of the night. She looked irritated, although Jonah had come to see this as her default state.
‘Everyone is waiting for you,’ said Kala. Jonah looked at her blankly. ‘The briefing,’ she said, impatiently. It was the first he had heard of any such thing. ‘Where is your girlfriend, the one who knows what she’s doing?!’ Kala demanded.
‘She’s not my—’ Jonah began, before being cut off by Kala.
‘Send her a pop-up message! My people are waiting.’
Jonah did not want Sam disturbed. ‘She’ll come out when she’s ready,’ he said.
The next few minutes seemed like hours to Jonah. Kala paced up and down, repeatedly glaring at Sam, in full meta-trance, and sighing in frustration. Jonah was almost ready to send that pop-up, after all, when Sam’s eyelids began to flutter.
He helped Sam out of the land yacht as she readjusted to her real-world body. He could tell from her expression that the news wasn’t good.
‘There’s no sign of them,’ Sam reported. ‘Either of them. Dad or Bradbury. Captain Teng has all his men working on it. They’re widening the search area.’
‘It took you a long time,’ said Kala pointedly, ‘to hear that.’
Jonah prickled at Kala’s rudeness. He opened his mouth to say something, but Sam didn’t rise to it. ‘I met with some contacts,’ she explained, ‘in the Guardians. I brought them up to date on our situation. They’re going to circulate descriptions of Dad and Bradbury’s avatars. There’ll be thousands of pairs of eyes watching out for them by this time tomorrow. I just hope...’
Kala tugged at Sam’s sleeve, and set off determinedly in the expectation of being followed. ‘Briefing,’ she said firmly.
There were about sixty people waiting for them on an old squash court. Most of these were male, most of them young, and about two-thirds Aborigines. About half of them were seated on white collapsible chairs, the rest standing.
An open-topped jeep overtook Jonah, Sam and Kala as they approached. It screeched to a halt in front of them and disgorged four lean, white Australian men in combat fatigues who proceeded to unload a collection of assorted weapons.
People spilled out of the squash court and gathered around the jeep. The men were handing out guns to anyone who needed one, along with pointers on their operation.
Jonah and Sam’s arrival went almost unnoticed.
A table with chairs behind it had been set up for them at one end of the court. As they took their places, Jonah eyed the activity around them. So this is our army, he thought. He felt deeply uncomfortable.
‘You know,’ he whispered to Sam, ‘I still don’t know what the plan is, exactly.’
‘I’ll do all the talking,’ Sam promised. ‘Just keep on backing me up.’
‘What was Kala saying before? About some place called Uluru, and giving it back to its owners?’
‘She means Ayers Rock,’ said Sam. ‘Uluru was its original name, the name the Aborigines gave it. It was – it still is – an important spiritual site to them.’
‘Isn’t it a solar power plant now?’ said Jonah, keen to show that he wasn’t entirely ignorant of real-world affairs.
Sam nodded. ‘Uluru was bought by a small American power-generating company. No one knew, at the time, that that company was one of Matthew Granger’s – but, of course, it must have been. The plant was just a front.’
‘He bought Uluru – Ayers Rock – to build the Southern Corner inside it.’
‘The Aborigines always claimed they were cheated out of their property,’ said Sam. ‘Knowing Granger, I’m sure they were.’
‘Then the deal Axel made with Kala was...?’
‘When the Guardians contacted Kala’s people,’ said Sam, ‘we still thought the Chang Bridge was a back-up device. We thought, once we had taken the Southern Corner, we could transfer its operations to our own server farm within a month. The Aboriginal Australians could have done what they wanted with Uluru, then.’
‘And now?’ said Jonah.
There was no time for Sam to answer. Kala had called for silence and now she introduced Jonah and Sam for the sake of those few who hadn’t seen them already. Sam thanked her, and rose to her feet.
‘We are going to take back Uluru by force,’ she began. ‘Anyone not ready for that should leave now.’
Nobody stirred, but Jonah felt a prickly dread in his stomach.
‘As you all know, Uluru has been hollowed out and filled with thousands of computers. The access points to the facility are on the very top of the rock. That is its greatest defence. We can’t climb up there on foot. We’d be sitting ducks for any Millennials standing above us. And that’s why your land yachts have been rigged with catapults. We need to sail close enough to Uluru, through the security perimeter, to launch our attack from above.’
Sam continued to talk, about the electric fences that surrounded their target and the Millennial guards that would put up a fierce fight in its defence. She speculated on the most likely layout of the Southern Corner inside Ayers Rock, intelligence that was cobbled together from Millennial defectors and former construction crews.
Kala interjected a few times, to assign specific tasks to specific groups of people – while Jonah just did as he had been told. He sat beside Sam and listened. He pretended he had heard all this before and was perfectly happy about it – which was no mean feat, as it happened.
The more Sam talked – the more Jonah heard about what was to happen tomorrow – the stronger his tingling sense of dread became.