They were in the office of Jason’s captain’s suite on the cloud ship. In deference to his intentions to handle his time of Earth responsibly, it was more like an expensive hotel suite than a maniacal villain’s lair. Jason was explaining his unproductive meeting with Anna and Boris.

“The problem, Jason,” Danielle said, “is you. You’ve always said that you prefer friends to allies.”

“I have, and I stand by that.”

“That’s nice, and if we were still at the point of hosting barbecues in the park back in Greenstone, that would be fine. But we’re a little past that, Jason. You’re mixing friends and allies on this trip, and the stakes are too high to leave things as disorganised as they are. Before we reach Earth, we need to develop an organisational structure. Authority, responsibilities. Who gets what information. From what you’re describing, a large part of the problem was a disconnect between you and Mrs Tilden over your respective roles.”

“You’re talking about a chain of command.”

“In part. I’m also talking about defining relationships with those who don’t fall under your influence, like Boris Ket Lundi. If everyone knows what is expected of them, and how they are meant to meet those expectations, you can avoid problems like these before they arise.”

He groaned and ran his hands over his face.

“Treating friends like allies is exactly what I want to avoid.”

“Jason, whether in friendship or an alliance, it works better when everyone knows where they stand. Clear communication.”

He thought that over for a moment, then nodded his acknowledgement of the point.

“That does sound reasonable. A perspective I can get my head around, in any case. Okay, we need to put together an org chart. How do I go about doing that?”

“We start by categorising everyone. Who is part of the formal structure you’re putting together? Myself, Mrs Tilden, the structure of your clan. That’s the easy part. Who are allies, like Boris? What can you expect from them, and what do they expect from you? Then there’s all the people coming with us. You might be treating them as tourists, but you’ve put yourself in charge of an adventurer expedition to another world. One of the most powerful expeditions ever staged, I’ll add. Multiple teams, a royal diplomatic delegation. What level of authority do you have over them? What do you expect from each other?”

Jason let out another groan.

“I’m about to have an incredibly tedious day, aren’t I?”

***

Lenora Coleman has been working at the dimensional artefact site for almost her entire adult life. Recruited right out of university, her excitement had been well and truly killed off by two years in a monitoring station. Back then, the site was little more than some pre-fab buildings in the ruins of a town whose name she’d never learned.

Things were different now, both for the site and for Lenora. Her formal title was now Director of Operations for Dimensional Artefact Site One. She wasn’t aware of any Dimensional Artefact Site Two, but she hadn’t gotten to pick the name. That had been the original person to hold her position, and current Australian Prime Minister, Gordon Truffett.

Lenora and her predecessors had overseen a massive transformation of the site. Following the arrival of an angelic host and one guy from New Zealand, the entire area had been remade into one of the most secure sites on planet Earth. A coalition of nations had spent the last fifteen years preparing it as a defensive point should anyone or anything hostile try and use the site as an invasion point.

The coalition was ostensibly led by Australia, as it was their territory, with Lenora as their representative. The reality was more complicated. Australia was largely dependent on the Network for their magical assets, or whatever the Network was calling themselves in any given year. They had named themselves the True Network, the Grand Network, the Original Network and just the Network, cycling through those and a few others on a roughly annual schedule. The joke was that the Network was secretly led by a shape-shifter who couldn’t tolerate maintaining a stable identity.

Aside from reliance on the Network, the other major factions demanded access to the site. The Australian government had granted access in various ways, depending on the influence and compensation involved. The United States and China both had consulate-level privileges for their areas around the site.

There was no longer any sign of the town that had once stood in the area. A small city now occupied the space, centred on the site itself. A ring of monitoring and research stations surrounded the half-kilometre of open ground between them and the outermost standing stones of the artefact itself. That open space was unadorned concrete. With concentric rings of metal panels. Each panel was a weapon bunker containing retractable weapons, magically enhanced howitzers and rocket batteries. The most potent mix of magic and technology the Earth could produce, they would emerge to attack any invader.

In addition to the weapon operators, a multinational force of essence users and other supernaturals was maintained on site. This included a rotating roster of gold rankers who were the reason Lenora did not have the command her title suggested. Most of the world’s gold rankers belonged to the United States and China, including almost all of the ones who had reached that rank without using cores. As a bureaucrat and not a fighter, Lenora was a core user herself and had never been clear on why that mattered. She was assured that it did when it came to combat ability.

Oddly enough, there was one Australian gold ranker, and one who had never used cores, at that. When the Australian government had turned against what became the GDN during the Network schism, he had quietly vanished. No one really knew or cared until he resurfaced a decade later as a self-made gold ranker. With no affiliation, he was heavily courted by every major power on the planet. He resoundingly rejected overtures from his home nation, along with every other group.

“Your head looks heavy,” Barry told her. “A burden shared is a burden halved.”

Her deputy, Barry, was what amounted to mayor of the artefact city. She wrangled the magical representatives and he kept the city that served their needs humming along. Her one-time supervisor, they shared her obnoxiously large office. The first director had done his best to create a throne room for himself, which subsequent directors had stripped down to a more sensible, if indulgently oversized space. The one thing she did like about the room was one wall being a massive window, looking out at the ring of standing stones. She often stood and stared at it when she was gaming out a problem in her head.

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“It’s nothing,” she told him. “I was thinking about Nigel Thornton. Whatever happened to him?”

“He was close with Annabeth Tilden, back in the day. Rumour has it that he’s joined her at the Asano clan. Or she joined him.”

“Asano,” she grumbled.

They had been preparing for Jason Asano’s impending return to Earth for weeks. Her tasks involved blanket denials to the press and regular video conferences with Tilden, the Asano’s clan’s unofficial new ambassador to the world. Most of her job, however, had been trying to prevent anyone onsite from doing something incredibly stupid. That had not worked out.

The Chinese adamantly denied that the man who tried to blow up the standing stones was one of theirs. The bomb had been powerful enough to scorch magically reinforced concrete, shaking the walls of the research buildings half a kilometre away. If not for their also being reinforced, the blast would have taken out some windows at the very least. The standing stones had been utterly unharmed, although the bomber was thinly smeared across several of them.

“Do we have a revised estimate on Asano’s arrival date?” Lenora asked.

“Nope,” Barry said. He got up and walked to the minifridge to grab a can of soft drink.

“Nora, you want one?” he offered, waving the can in her direction.

“Do we have anything other than TaB?”

“Nope.”

“Fine, I’ll take one. I’ve got to stop letting you stock the fridge.”

They crashed on the couch together, both running on a week of too-little sleep. They cracked open their cans, each took a sip and slumped back.

“Did you know that Terry in the media office is Anna Tilden’s brother?” Barry asked.

“Yeah, although I didn’t know he was still in the media office. I thought they fired him after that thing with the K-pop band and the animated gloves.”

“No, they just made him do a bunch of seminars.”

“How did he get away with that?”

“Old Network family. They were some of the first white essence users in Australia, apparently. Nice for some. Actually, now that I think about it, what happened to all the black essence users? Someone was dealing with proto-spaces before the British turned up and decided they owned everything, right?”

“The Network founder set up an indigenous Network organisation, but it wasn’t anything like the modern branches. As far as I know, most of them joined the Cabal.”

“The Cabal has had essence users this whole time?”

“Not anymore. The incoming British Network people attacked them on sight, so the indigenous people left the proto spaces to them. Without the resources to make new essence users, those in the Cabal eventually died of old age. The same story played out everywhere the Europeans decided the locals needed the light of civilisation.”

“Civilisation meaning disease, exploitation, pillage and slavery.”

“Yep. But that was where the Cabal got most of their information on essence users. The messengers secretly amongst them probably told them things as well, but my understanding is that they were avoiding being too all-knowing.”

“So that people didn’t figure out they were aliens for another dimension, and not angels? Aren’t angels meant to be all-knowing?”

“No one outside the Cabal can really be sure how it worked. Even now, they’re a house full of secrets. Most of what we know is interpolation and guesswork.”

“Where did you learn all this stuff, Nora?”

“It’s my job to deal with an eclectic mix of magical and political forces from across the globe. How did you get this far without learning all this stuff?”

“I mostly stood next to you and took care of the easy bits, so you’d do all the hard ones.”

She snorted a laugh and tapped her can to his.

“Here’s to the easy bits,” she toasted.

***

Jason’s legs dangled off the edge of the ship, swinging absently as he munched on a sandwich.

“Aren’t you afraid that your legs will be torn off and reduced to non-existence?” Zara asked.

She sat cross-legged next to him.

“I’m not sticking any limbs out there.”

“It’s fine,” Jason told her. “Technically, this is the same magic Boris and his messengers used to go to Earth. My specific nature shields me.”

He slapped the deck with his hand.

“The container I’ve put you all in is just a nicer version of the one Rufus and Taika travelled in.”

“A lot nicer,” she agreed.

“I don’t think theirs had a bar.”

He put his sandwich down on the plate sitting next to him.

“You were trained to be a princess from birth, right?”

“I was.”

“In the expectation that you would become Hurricane Princess, then Storm Queen.”

“That was the idea. Not that it worked out that way.”

“A lifetime of training, and you still managed to monumentally blow the whole shebang, making things worse for everyone around you.”

“I remember, yes, but thank you for reminding me of the worst sequence of mistakes I’ve even made in my life.”

A grin flashed briefly on his face before it became sombre again.

“My political training consists of whatever Danielle can cram into my thick skull. How am I meant to get this right when you can have all the training in the world and get it wrong? I’m at a point where very few consequences can harm me directly. They’ll all fall on the people around me, whether that’s my companions or just innocent people in general. Was it wrong to set up this fight on Earth?”

She leaned her shoulder into his.

“There is no right, Jason. That’s what I’ve learned from all my mistakes. There’s no right and there’s no wrong, not from a practical perspective. There’s only what happened, and what happens next. It’s the only thing you can change, so that’s where you put your energy.”

“You do the best you can with what you have?”

“Exactly. Sometimes your best isn’t good enough. But, good or bad, all you can do is keep going. Try to make your best a little better each time.”

He sat with that for a long while.

“Thank you,” he said finally. “I thought you wouldn’t be any help, because of what a huge political disaster you are, but there was a nugget of wisdom in there.”

She turned to give him a dagger-sharp glare as he did a poor job of masking a grin.

“My advice isn’t free,” she told him. “Give me the rest of your sandwich.”

“There are plenty more up in the lounge.”

“I’m not up in the lounge. Hand it over, Asano.”

He mock-grumbled as he reached for the plate.

***

After their break, Lenora and Barry returned to work. Lenora fired off emails in a futile attempt to head off diplomatic bushfires. Barry was going through contingencies for the artefact city’s populace, for when Jason’s arrival inevitably caused a massive problem. Responses ranged from public warnings to lockdowns to a citywide evacuation.

“Why did they never name the town?” he wondered aloud. “Everyone just calls it the artefact city.”

“Technically speaking, it’s Dimensional Artefact Site One.”

“Who named it something that boring?”

“Who do you think?”

“Oh,” Barry groaned. “Our illustrious Prime Minister. I have this vague recollection of someone trying to get it changed. Am I misremembering?”

“No, but none of the interested parties could ever agree on a more ordinary name. The Chinese wanted it to be meaningful and the Americans didn’t want it to sound foreign. Neither wanted the other to get what they wanted, and Australian names were roundly rejected. I was actually in a meeting where someone told the Americans that Woolloomooloo was a town name and they went completely spare. The French tried to sneak a name in while everyone else was fighting, but that didn’t work. In the end, it got left the way it is.”

“Dimensional Artefact Site One.”

“Yep.”

“One.”

“Yep.”

“So, site two is some secret spot out in the desert?”

“Barry, we’re out in the desert.”

“Yeah, but we’re not secret. We have a media relations department.”

“So do they. Their media department just has machine guns.”

“There’s really a secret base out there?”

“You don’t have clearance for me to tell you that.”

There was a knock at the door.

“Director?” the voice came of their shared assistant came through the door.

“Come in, Cassie.”

Cassie was new, competent but still frazzled as she adjusted to the current schedule. Her curly hair had clearly been rebundled atop her head following a couch nap.

“Mrs Tilden, Mr Remore and Mr Williams are looking to have a meeting, Director.”

“They want to set up a conference call?”

“No, Director. They’re downstairs.”