MetaWars: Fight For The Future

Chapter 17

Another plane zoomed overhead.

The Guardians took cover beneath a scraggly

hedgerow. Jonah lay in the dirt, with brambles scratching his cheeks. Still, he was glad to give his feet a short rest.

When the sound of jet engines had receded, they brushed down their clothes and walked on. Jonah felt as if they had been walking for hours. It couldn’t have been all that long, though, because the sun was still high in the sky.

The others had landed not far from Jonah. He had clocked them from the air and found them quickly enough. They had covered Jonah’s parachute with grass and soil, to keep it from being seen from above. Then they had set off across the French fields on foot.

Sam was leading the way, with a compass she had produced from a pocket of her black coveralls. She avoided well-trodden footpaths, and skirted fields rather than crossing them, keeping cover close at hand.

Jonah had never been in such a wide-open space before – not in the real world, anyway. It felt as if he, Sam, Axel and Bradbury were the only people in the world. They weren’t, of course.

They had to hide in a ditch from a slow-grinding tractor, driven by a grizzled old man in denims. He didn’t look to Jonah like a Millennial agent. Still, Bradbury eased his shotgun out of his trench coat and held it ready. Jonah was relieved – for the old man’s sake – when the tractor had passed them by.

They set off again, and soon came into view of a small, whitewashed farmhouse, with alternating green and black shutters.

‘That’s where we wait,’ confirmed Sam. She pulled ahead of the others, and Jonah hurried to keep up with her, leaving Axel and Bradbury trailing behind them.

‘You were going to tell me about your mission,’ he said, glad of the chance to talk with Sam alone. ‘Before the airship was attacked.’

Sam nodded. ‘There’s a man in Shanghai,’ she said. ‘He’s invented a way to protect the Metasphere from outside control. A device. He calls it the Chang Bridge.’

‘You were going to China?’ said Jonah. ‘In an airship?’

‘This,’ said Sam, ‘this device, it’s everything the Guardians have ever wanted, a way to keep the Metasphere free. The trouble is, we may have found it too late. Granger is out of jail – and, for the Chang Bridge to work, we still have to find the Four Corners. That was your father’s job, but when he...when he died...’

‘He took the information with him,’ concluded Jonah.

‘Until now.’

‘Um,’ said Jonah. ‘Axel, your dad...he said there might be a way...?’

‘He wants to do a full search,’ said Sam, ‘of your head.’

‘You can do that? How?’

‘With some software developed a few years back,’ said Sam. ‘We hook you up to a terminal, and the program goes through all the data in your brain, organising and indexing it. Once it’s done, we can search for specific terms.’

‘Terms like “The Four Corners”,’ Jonah guessed.

‘If you really do know where they are – even if the information is buried deep in your subconscious – we can find it with a few keystrokes.’

‘Wow!’

‘Don’t be too impressed,’ said Sam. ‘The process hurts like a vice grip to the grey matter, and it could...’