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Millennia ago, when the rest of the world’s population refused to sail out sight of land for fear of never seeing it again, Miyuki’s ancestors first set out in their double-hulled canoes to conquer the world’s largest ocean. As she paddled her surfboard out toward the horizon, a sharp line miles away across the sparkling blue of the Pacific, she liked to imagine herself at the oars of a wa'a kaulua. Unlike her ancestors, however, Miyuki turned back to shore when she judged the swell of the tide was headed her way, paddling the other direction until the wave caught her and began to pull her along.
She gained speed as the wave reached shallower water, standing up on her board as the wave crested, riding up, over, and then shooting sideways into the curl. She could feel the cold spray of the wave closing around her; hear it pounding like a chorus of Heiau Pahu beating all together. The wave began to lose itself in a froth of white foam and she gave the board a final lean, curving back up the collapsing trough and then sailing clear of it entirely, and, for a few exhilarating moments, hanging weightless until she fell back into the icy water’s familiar embrace.

As she waded ashore, she caught sight of a familiar, pale figure dressed all in black, waving to her from amidst the bright collage of sunbathers, towels, and beach umbrellas.
“Hey, Clarissa.”
“Hi Miyuki, glad I found you. C’mon, we have to get to the Asian Art Museum.”
“I…what?”
“We have to get to the Asian Art Museum, right away. I spotted the Oracle Sword there last night.”
“I thought your party was at City Hall.” Miyuki untethered her board from her ankle. “But if the sword’s in a Museum that would seem to mean the treasure hunt’s over.”
“Not the sword itself, a picture of a picture on one of the special exhibition banners outside.”
“I don’t see why exactly this has to happen right now.” Miyuki found herself being propelled toward the stairs up the seawall. “At least let’s go back to my place first so I can change.”
“The Museum’s closed Mondays, and you can change in the car, c’mon.” They had arrived at Clarissa’s Land Rover, and she stopped, apparently unsure which end to bundle Miyuki into.
“Well OK,” Miyuki slid her board through the truck’s tailgate, and slid the wetsuit’s zipper down her back as she walked around the passenger side. “but we really should swing by my place first. Gotta rinse the salt out of everything.”
“What? No, do it later. Yalla imshi. You’re not imshi-ing.”
“Just sayin’. I don’t want to get seawater on your upholstery,” Standing naked behind the passenger door as if it was an old fashioned dressing screen, Miyuki held her wetsuit out for Clarissa to stash with her board. “Do you have anything for me to change into?”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure you don’t do these things on purpose,” Clarissa said as they pulled out of the parking lot and turned uphill toward Miyuki’s apartment. “but don’t think you’re getting out of going to the museum just ‘cause you don’t have any clothes on now.”
“Hey, you’re the one who said I could change in the car, I figured you’d at least have a towel for me.” Miyuki sat low in the passenger seat, legs crossed demurely, arms folded over her bare breasts. The Rover’s high clearance meant the average passerby couldn’t see in, or so she hoped. “I put my suit on at home and walked down here, I was gonna walk home later and take it off. And say what you will, I’m pretty sure they won’t let me in like this.”
“I suppose not. So anyway you know how the Asian Art Museum’s across from City Hall? Well when I came out of the party last night, I was waiting for the valet to bring my car back and they had the big exhibition banners on the front of the Museum all flood lit – it’s a traveling exhibit from the National Museum in New Delhi, by the way – and one of them has a big picture of the Emperor Akbar, and a guy with the Oracle Sword. You’d’ve really liked the party, by the way.”
“Really?”
“Well maybe not the substance of it, that was kinda boring, but there was an open bar and a lot of nice cars. I saw a Maserati going in and some kind of Lamborghini coming out.”
“That reminds me, I saw your phantom Mercedes last night.” Miyuki sank slightly further into the seat as they came to a stop at a red light, and a pair of pedestrians crossed the street in front of them. “There was a Chinatown mob meeting and that car was there – in a parking lot in the San Bruno Mountains.”
“D’you think Levine is mixed up with the Triads?”
“He’s mixed up with the Shanghai Economic and Trade Office, which I’m guessing has something to do with the Chinese consulate, since they have access to a consular car. They’re in it with Triads.” Miyuki caught sight of her apartment building ahead as they turned the corner. “I don’t know what any of that means yet, but some guys are looking into it.”
“Huh.” Clarissa pulled into the driveway and pulled her parking brake up with a substantial heave. “Levine wasn’t at the party last night, but people were clearly expecting him to be.”
The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue. It wasn’t quite noon yet and already warm enough to verge on uncomfortable; as she hopped down to the sidewalk Miyuki reflected that, with the exception of her bare feet on the hot concrete, today was not such a bad day to be naked after all. She stood with her hands on the frame of the Rover’s open passenger door for a few moments trying to think of something clever to say, but seeing a car coming in the distance she finally settled for “Bring my board in, will you?” and disappeared into her building’s front door.

“Christ Murphy, you look like hell.”
“Gee, thanks, Charlie. I’m sure I’ve looked worse.” Several days worth of stubble and lack of sleep made Danny’s face uncharacteristically surly and vicious looking, while a superficial cut on his forehead had gone unbandaged, the trail of dried blood making it look far more impressive than it actually was. He wasn’t wrong, though, he had looked much worse.
“The Chief came in not too long ago, he said to let you know he’s waitin’ for you upstairs.” The FPS guard nodded to the end of the line of the airport-style metal detectors that led to the federal building’s black marble and granite lobby. A gate stood apart at the end, bearing a red and white sign whereupon the Federal Protective Services reminded the public that this entrance was for armed government personnel only. As part of his job Murphy would normally be carrying a concealed weapon at all times, having come directly from the plane from Vandenberg, he was carrying a small arsenal. The guard didn’t blink at any of it though; the Federal law enforcement agencies that operated out of the building had been carrying military grade weapons for decades.

The autumn sun streaming through his office’s floor-to-ceiling windows illuminated the Deputy Director of Operations, Pacific Command from behind, causing his close cropped hair to glow like a small flat halo atop his tan, square-jawed face. He looked unnatural in a polo shirt and khakis, Murphy thought; although really he thought the Chief was pushing his luck in a civilian suit; men like him sprung from the forehead of Joint Special Operations Command fully formed and armored head to toe.
“Murphy, ‘bout damn time, come in. I’ve been in contact with General Wright down at Vandenberg, he forwarded your report. Sit down. That’s not what I called you in for, but since you’re here, run it down.”
Danny covered the relevant facts again, judiciously starting when the first infiltrator attacked, after Lyta had left his room.
“… unfortunately, while trying to subdue the hostile, Agent Weber broke his neck and killed him. When I exited the lab area I found that the prisoner I had taken earlier had crawled over to the window and deliberately cut his throat on a piece of broken glass. He bled out before the medics could stabilize him.”
The Chief stared pensively out the window for a while. Finally he turned and fixed Murphy with his icy blue eyes. “What do you think?”
As a field operative Murphy restricted his report to the facts, analysts would sift through them and offer opinions. That didn’t mean he didn’t have one, of course.
“Well sir, all the gear we recovered was PLA or PLAN issue, down to the scuba tanks. The weapons we recovered were mostly QCW-05s with suppressors, which are only issued to PLA special forces units. I think someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to make us think the Chinese are responsible, but I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t?”
“Give me a few days and I can get you the same stuff locally, but American and European, mostly legally and without too much attention. Hell, it’s probably easier to buy an MP5 on the streets of LA then smuggle guns in from China. It makes sense if these guys were a rapid reaction force deployed directly from a ship or FOB somewhere, but a deployment this far this quick is beyond their capabilities.”
“A sleeper cell somewhere on the west coast certainly isn’t.”
“No sir, but in that case they burned it for nothing. Their best chance of success was in sticking together and moving on their objective; instead they split up, wasted time, and made as much noise as possible. It’s almost like they were trying to fail. Altogether it’s out of character; Beijing is careful as hell, they’re happy to try to intimidate their smaller neighbors, but scrupulously avoid action past a point, especially with us. And they almost never act precipitously, not for anything that needs high level approval, like this. It’s a pretty dangerous escalation for them, and for something that didn’t involve any core national interests.”
Murphy fell silent. He hoped he sounded persuasive. It was all conjecture; the evidence all pointed the other way.
“Uh huh.” It was as much as the Chief was likely to say on the matter, like most people in the intelligence business he wasn’t unnecessarily talkative. “Reason I called you back up here last night, is that flight recorder you brought back from Wonsan. When the Boeing boys cracked it open, they shared the data with CSAF and SecAF, and they didn’t like what they saw. Well, someone at the Pentagon didn’t. PRISM’s been goin’ nuts for any mention of a DoD black project called MARIPOSA. Ever heard of it?”
“No sir.”
“Well it’s heard of you.” The Chief slid a single sheet of paper across his desk, which Danny recognized as the printed copy of an NSA signals intercept. “Apparently you’re on the disclosure list, and the Pentagon wants this run to earth.”
Danny took a look at the intercept sheet. Two phones, both pre-paid mobiles from a no-name carrier; one had texted the other a single word: MARIPOSA. “Do you have a brief on what this project is supposed to be about? Would be handy to know what I’m looking for before I start looking for it.”
“No idea. You’re on the disclosure list, and you’re there by yourself. Go home and get some sleep, you look like hell. You can pick this up tomorrow.”

Danny stopped by his desk on his way back out; if he could send off a few preliminary emails now he’d have answers coming in to his phone early tomorrow morning. Or at the very least he’d have responses, since responses wouldn’t necessarily contain answers. As he unslung his HK 416 Rifle and laid it across his desk blotter, he saw that in his absence his office line had begun to accrue voicemails.
“Hello Daniel, this is Todd Lundberg calling from the GSA, I just wanted to follow up on my request last Tuesday of your GSA3609 form for August…” Murphy deleted the message. Todd Lundberg could keep on waiting.
“Hey man, it’s Gus. C’mon down to the motor pool when you’re back in, I got somethin’ you’re gonna like.” Gustavo was the Agency’s local motor pool mechanic; he was always looking for ways to make the vehicle fleet more interesting, and had adopted Danny as his co-conspirator. At the very least, Monday was starting to look up.
“Agent Murphy, this is Special Agent Al Gomez from the FBI Pacific Rim Organized Crime Task Force, I got a flag from the NCIC about a case I’m working on – they’re telling me it’s a DHS matter and to bring you in. We already have an ICE liaison on the team so I don’t know what this is about, but I’d like to clear this, and SFPD Homicide would too, so give me a call…” Gomez sounded exasperated, and probably would have been doubly so if he knew Murphy didn’t actually work for Homeland Security and was holding up a murder investigation for reasons only remotely connected to his duties and entirely on his own initiative. Murphy had a DHS ID in his office’s wall safe, along with many others, he wrote a reminder to himself to make sure he had it with him tomorrow.
“Good Afternoon Captain Murphy, my name is Travis Howard and I’m calling from the 187th Regimental association. I have a fellow vet who wants to get in touch with you, if you can give me a call between 9 and 5 Eastern at…” Danny took down the number. He sat back in his chair and looked at the wall across from him; a glass frame held a tattered black Taliban flag, surmounted by the divisional patch of the 101st Airborne, the famous “Screaming Eagles”, parent unit to the 187th, and an afghan tulwar.
“Hey, wake up.” Lyta stood in the doorway, looking imposingly professional in a freshly pressed uniform. “I’da thought a good Irish boy would have other places to be on a Sunday morning.”
“I’m an Episcopalian. And not a good one. Chief call you in for something too?”
“Nah, a small plane crashed in the San Bruno Mountains last night, the NTSB onsite guy wants an Air Force rep to come see it, I don’t know why, I guess when it came down it passed through the restricted airspace around SFO or something. Have you always had that sword?”
“Yeah, I bought it at a bazaar in Kandahar on my first tour. I don’t think you’ve seen it before though, it’s been in a box at home. I’ve got a couple of ‘em, actually.”
“Christ, you’re just like my roommate. How many swords does a twenty first century person need?”
“I didn’t get the one I wanted the first time around, so I went back a few times.” Danny looked back at the Taliban flag, summoning the past from deep within the white script of the shahada. “We were on a patrol through the Kandahar bazaar, one of those ‘glad hand the locals, make friends with everyone, but in full battle rattle and anyone who gets too close to the Humvee we threaten to light up’ patrols. You know, civil affairs. Anyway, we’re talking to everyone, buying random stuff to make ‘em happy, spread some money their way. There was plenty of the kinda stuff the guys wanted too; bootleg DVDs, rugs, old Soviet gear, Khyber Pass Enfields, and tulwars. There was this one guy, a Uyghur or Turkmen maybe, and he had this one really unusual sword; he had me draw it to check out the blade, and right then we heard an AK popping away at the other end of the street and then everything kicked off. Like it does in Afghanistan, you know. Anyway, by the time everything was secure again I went back and the guy was gone.”
“Sounds oddly sensible. What made the sword so special, anyway?”
“On the face of it, not a lot. The blade was less curved than the usual tulwar, more like a civil war cavalry saber. The big thing - it’s kinda hard to describe – when I drew it out, it had a pattern weld on the blade that looked like it moved, almost like it had a life of its own. I figured it was probably Indian, since about a third of the way down the blade it had an old Hindu symbol engraved on it.”
“Ooh, was it a guy with an elephant head?”
“Nah, it was pair of eyes, with a third eye opening between them.”

“That church really looks like the spinny part of a washing machine.” As the light went green Clarissa gave the gearshift a flourish and the Land Rover lurched forward. “Also, we need to break in to Professor Levine’s house.”
“Those are certainly two related, coherent thoughts.” Miyuki said, watching the smooth white, upward sweep of St. Mary’s Cathedral pass by her window. She had showered the seawater out of her hair and was now dressed characteristically in a tank top and track pants. “You’re right though.”
“About the church, or about breaking into Levines house?”
“About the church; the spinny part of a washing machine is called the agitator by the way. Although I suppose we may as well break into Levine’s house. We don’t know if he’s working with the Triads or they caused him to disappear, but it’s worth breaking into his house to find out. Why did you want to?”
“I just want to see what books he’s got and I figured his mysterious disappearance was a good excuse. We’re coming up on it now, so check out the exhibit banner on the left.”
The mustachioed face of Abu'l-Fath Jalal ud-din Muhammad Akbar, third and greatest of the Mughal emperors looked benevolently down at them from between a apair of columns on the beaux-arts façade of the Asian Art Museum, while from off the side of the banner someone held a sword up to him pommel first, a sword with three eyes on the scabbard. Inside, a security guard reminded them to turn their phones to silent, and Clarissa presented some kind of credential from the University which managed to get them waved past admissions and into the special exhibit.
The main hall was dominated by the ornate caparison and howdah for a regal processional elephant, worn by a startlingly realistic dummy. The larger statues were on display here as well, a dancing Shiva and pink sandstone Ganesh, Sarasvati seated on a lotus, the invincible goddess Durga standing astride the slain buffalo demon Mahisasura. Miyuki thought the goddess’s eyes followed her as she walked. She stopped and gazed at the serene stone face, incongruous with the active pose of the goddess’s semi-nude body, or the tiger curled around her legs. Each of her many arms brandished a different weapon, save the one that held a severed head by the hair.
“Just like you on a Monday.” Clarissa took her by the arm. “C’mon, the Mughal Empire things are over here.”
The dim side gallery glittered with jewels and gilt, the beautiful and elaborately decorated objets d’art that represented the fusion of Indian and Persian influences in the empire at the height of its power. Above all these were the paintings; miniatures of court life and battles, scenes from love poems, religious stories from Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and, curiously, Islam, each hung in a gilt frame in a small pool of light carefully calculated to illuminate without fading the vivid colors. The painting they were looking for took pride of place in the center of the wall.
The painting in its entirety presented a different image than the segment on the banner outside. Sitting placidly on his golden throne Akbar looked on as did a crowd of courtiers and soldiers. In their midst, a man with a shaved head appeared to have entered a trance of some kind, dancing rhythmically while holding the sword above his head; the stylized lack of diminution in the perspective only made it look as if it was being held out to the Emperor, and yet he was gesturing as if he were reaching out for it.
“The Emperor Akbar the Great receives an Oracle in the Diwan-I-Khas.” Miyuki read from the placard. “I think we’ve got some critical info here, it says here it’s gouache on paper.”
“Well you could keep reading, but it doesn’t get very specific. I could tell you most of this.” Clarissa slipped her phone out as she talked and nonetheless made a note of the painting’s name and catalog number. “Akbar was a Muslim, but despite the largely exclusive nature of Islam he was extremely tolerant toward the other religions in India, to the extent that he had the Ramayana translated so he could learn more about it. He married both a Hindu and a Christian along with his Muslim wife without forcing either to convert… he said it brought him closer to his people. And remember this is at a time when he didn’t have to do any of that, the Mughals were a conquering army, they ruled by force, but Akbar knew the key to long term stability was the consent and cooperation of the governed. There is something useful here though.”
“What’s that?”
“The Diwan-I-Khas is the hall of private audience, which would be reserved for audiences with members of the imperial court or state visitors. Members of the public would have an audience in the Diwan-I-Am. So our friend was important enough to get an official state audience. And judging from his saffron robe and lack of hair and a beard he’s meant to be a Buddhist monk or holy man.”
“Buddhism itself doesn’t have oracles, although it kinda sucks up things from indigenous religions, our version is pretty Shinto-ized, mainstream Japanese Buddhism even more so.” Miyuki cocked her head sideways as she examined the figure at the center of the painting. “Also, we wear black.”

Lyta followed her directions up the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway to a narrow access road, blocked by a pair of orange cones and a white Ford Explorer belonging to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department. She presented her ID to the accompanying deputy without comment, and only when he backed his vehicle out of the way did she see the badly twisted metal gate lying in the scrub beyond.
She followed the winding road past a number of tall, spidery metal broadcast towers, until it ended in a small parking lot, overflowing with official vehicles. She slid her motor pool Charger in between a North County Fire Authority SUV and a white utility van with government plates, and climbed out of the air conditioned interior. The air outside was hot and very still, and the golden hills around her hummed with insects. A small knot of men stood in the shadow of the broadcast tower where the pavement ended, and she headed toward them.
“Someone call for the Air Force?”
“Yeah, that’d be me.” A thickset man in a navy polo shirt and Day-Glo orange vest with “NTSB” printed in large black letters on the back detached himself from the others. “Carl Rasmussen, NTSB.”
“Lieutenant Hippolyta Rodriguez, DHS AFSOC liason. Whattaya got for me?”
“It’s down over there.” Rasmussen nodded toward the pathless slope, covered in short grass and scrub, and cast a doubtful glance at the high heels Lyta wore with the short skirt of her Service Dress Uniform.
“Lead on.”
Rasmussen had a practical, blue-collar sensibility to him, Lyta thought that he probably wouldn’t have called her if he didn’t feel it was absolutely necessary. Down the slope she could see two more NTSB agents standing near a large black scar on the mountain, burned clear of grass and scrub. It was far too small to be the impact site of a full sized commercial airplane; even a small, single-engined civilian craft would have left more debris.
“Right here.” Rasmussen nodded to a chunk of charred twisted metal, half buried in the ground. Despite the damage, Lyta recognized it instantly.
“That’s an MQ-9. Or what’s left of one, at least. What’s it doing here?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me. Looks like someone shot it full o’ holes, but what brought it down was when one of the wings smacked the tower back there.”
“If the Air Force lost one, we’d have a team out here before they called you. Anything with a number survive?”
“Yeah, under that tarp there. Jerry, pull ‘er back, will ya?”
Under the tarp were the bent remains of an electrically driven 6-barrelled M-134 minigun, and the lower vertical stabilizer of the drone, badly mangled but intact; it had apparently torn off and been thrown clear before the fire started.
“Air Force tail numbers for drones start with AF,” Lyta began slowly, “for the Border Patrol they start ‘CPB’, and NASA has the NASA logo.”
“But this, though…” Rasmussen trailed off. The tail number remained perfectly legible, and they both recognized it; a six digit letter-number combination starting with N, a tail number for a civilian craft.
“But I don’t know what to make of that. And that’s trouble.”

Lyta had planned to go straight home from the crash site, but she decided she’d better swing back by the office after all. At the bottom of the hill where the access road met the Parkway, she stopped while the deputy moved his truck out of the way. While the Charger sat idling Lyta gave the damaged gate a casual glance, and then froze. Right at the point of impact was a smudge of paint, a very distinct, and familiar, shade of fluorescent lime.

The sun was low in the sky by the time Clarissa’ Land Rover pulled up in front of the nijumon of the Japantown temple, causing the large granite lanterns that flanked the entrance to cast long sinister shadows across the warm pavement. Miyuki led the way into the complex while Clarissa stayed close by. Past experience had made her aware of the many possible dangers that lurked in the shadows, and while ultimately she had been granted acceptance by the ninja community, it had only been after much deliberation. She had no illusions as to what would have happened to her had they not. Amid the chirp of crickets and the distant sound of traffic they heard a rhythmic clinking of metal on metal that grew progressively louder as Miyuki led them toward the armory.

Brother Armorer Greene brought out a small wood table and chairs and the three of them sat outside under a string of paper lanterns in the gathering dusk; the heat of the forge made the public part of the armory unbearable. A boy brought a teapot and three cups, and then vanished into the shadows.
“Gen Ma Cha,” Greene said as he filled their cups. “Brown rice tea, the people’s tea. Shincha is considered the premium Japanese tea, I’ve always liked this better.”
“Yeah, me too.” Miyuki held her cup in both hands and sipped gently. The familiar taste of green tea intermingled with roasted rice always reminded her a little of her childhood.
“Well, on to business.” Greene placed Miyuki’s Xerox of the Oracle sword on the table. “From this picture, plus a few others, I’d say your sword is likely a Chinese dao; the fittings are from Nepal, Tibet, or Bhutan, probably from the 17th or 18th century, while the blade is much older – you’ll note that Qing dynasty dao blades are often more flared at the end, but it’s the mottling of the steel that gives it away. It was probably forged in northern India or the Himalayas, a very long time ago.”
“You have other pictures?” Clarissa had been leaning forward; she sat abruptly upright and almost elbowed her tea cup off the table.
“One or two.” Greene took the pot by its handle and methodically refilled their cups. “Luckily the Morioka boys digitized all our records for us a few years ago, this would have taken years for me to find the old fashioned way. Anyway, this one is about 36” long, with a 30” blade, which is typical for Tibetan Oracle Swords.”
“There’s more than one? So it isn’t unique?” Miyuki asked. She hadn’t thought she was as invested in the search as Clarissa, and the notion was surprisingly disappointing.
Greene laid another printout on the table, this time an old color photo, scanned and enlarged. In it, a much younger Brother Armorer, tall and thin and dressed in a Nehru jacket, stood with a portly man in a red monk’s robe, with a shaved head.
“Not exactly.” Greene paused while he cast his mind back in time, it had been decades. “This is me with the Nechung Oracle, in India some years ago. The Nechung Oracle is the state oracle to the Dalai Lama; he’s the most important, but still one of many. Properly, this man is the medium. In the Tibetan tradition, the oracle is a spirit of some kind, an entity that possesses a human medium, known as the kuten, and passes along its revelation.”
Miyuki set her cup down and started to ask a question, but Greene held his hand up and she stopped.
“This is the old religion, little sister. There are gods and demons that have lived in those mountains since before the coming of Buddhism, longer than anyone can remember. Anyway, when the possession takes hold, the kuten moves around, sometimes unpredictably, brandishing a sword. Done right he’s also wearing 70 lbs of mirrored armor. He can’t move in it normally, that’s how you know who’s in control.”
“But this sword we’re looking for gets handed around.” Clarissa prodded the Xerox. “I’m admittedly only familiar in passing with Bonpo and the Himalayan oracular tradition, but this seems to work by a different set of rules entirely.”
“It does.” Greene set down another printed page, this time a scan of a document, handwritten in simple but elegant Japanese calligraphy. The ink appeared faded, the rice paper well worn. “Toward the end of the Heian period, shortly before the outbreak of Genpei War, our honored Abbot General Koryu traveled to China to perfect his understanding of Dharma at the Linji school. While he was there, he also went to Shaolin. He doesn’t say why, but probably to see their kung fu. He was one of us, after all.
“While he was staying there, he met another monk, who he calls a ‘red monk from the west,’ a monk, Koryu says, of great piety and physical courage but no learning, a man chosen solely to bear a sword to the Abbot of Shaolin.” Greene laid another page down, a continuation of the scanned scroll, but this page bore an ink brush drawing, which, in a few elegant strokes, illustrated the essential qualities of a sword with three eyes inscribed on the blade. “The way Abbot General Koryu describes it, whoever the sword was given to could become the kuten.”
Greene fell silent, and the three sat quietly over their tea. A deep, unearthly gonging noise boomed in the distance; the monks had struck the bonsho, the massive bronze bell that hung in the temple’s forecourt, to summon their brothers to meditation.
“Brother Armorer,” Miyuki began as the bell’s reverberations died away. “You mentioned the pattern of the metal being distinctive, but I don’t see it in any of these pictures.”
“It’s visible in the photos.” Greene placed a small stack of photos on the table, the last of his papers. “These are the archive prints so I need to give them back, but we can make copies.”
They were black and white, but nonetheless clear and expertly taken. The sword rested on a platform, apparently in front of a statue of a bodhisattva, surrounded by candles and a handful of ceremonial items. Then it was obligingly held up for the camera by an ancient man in the loose robes and high, fin-shaped hat characteristic of the Gelug monks of Tibet, then the monk stood with an acolyte next to a white stone stupa decked with flags, in a bleak, rocky landscape entirely devoid of plant life. Then more close ups of the sword being held, one with a Nordic looking man holding up a tape measure to the blade. The close ups showed a flowing, watery pattern of metals within the blade, the “Damascus” pattern famed throughout pre-industrial Europe and Asia for its durability and ability to hold an edge.
“Do you know when were these taken?” Clarissa slid the photo of the sword on its altar from the bottom of the stack and peered closely at the many curious objects in it.
“1939. It’s on the back.” Greene flipped over one of the other photos. Along with a handwritten date it bore a pair of stamps – one from the War Department indicating it was from one of several sets of duplicates acquired in 1945, the other a faux-viking insignia of a sword surrounded by a loop of text, designed to look vaguely like runes.
“The Deutsches Ahnenerbe!” Clarissa gasped. By the light of the lanterns, Miyuki thought she might have gone a shade paler, if that was at all possible.
“Uh huh.” Greene finished his tea, and poured himself another cup. “One of our guys was working intelligence during the war, and passed on anything he thought we oughta know about. He was translating things from Japanese, of course, and these came from the Japanese, but more than that I can’t tell you.”

“So,” Miyuki began casually, as the girls walked back toward the temple gate, “What exactly is this German herbal business anyway?”
“The Deutsches Ahnenerbe.” Clarissa corrected her, “It was an academic institute founded in Germany in the 30s, although it really just functioned as a branch of the Nazi party. Their original mandate was to research the origins of the Aryan race, to give an anthropological basis to the Nazi’s racial theories.”
“Well, that’s… unfortunate I guess.”
“That’s not all of it though, The Ahnenerbe fell under the direct control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. He redirected the society’s efforts based on his own beliefs in the occult, digging into some pretty dark things.” Clarissa paused, and looked into the flickering light of a nearby lantern. “The kinds of things we shouldn’t believe in anymore.”
“Didn’t do him much good in the end though, did it?” Miyuki stopped and grabbed Clarissa by the arm. “Hang on, I have one more stop to make while we’re here. Wait for me by the gate, and, um, don’t wander off.”

Alli stood in a circle of enemies, or rather, two concentric circles of targets that symbolized enemies; anthropomorphic wood dummies, much scarred by long years of regular use. The stone floor of the practice yard was still warm under her bare feet; she had started her workout when the sun was higher in the sky and as night began to fall was wet with perspiration, though clad only in a sports bra and shorts. There was no trainer to order her to start, she would strike when ready.
Her weapon, the kusarigama, consisted of a kama, a one handed sickle, which was attached by a long chain to a heavy iron weight. As she sprang into action, the sickle slashed across the faces and chests of the near dummies, while the chain shot out and snaked back, the iron weight striking the heads of the far dummies with skull-splitting force. Shifting her footwork she then whirled the chain in a series of entangling movements, ensnaring the necks, arms, and legs of the dummies and pulling them to the ground, where a quick strike from the kama added one more scar to the wood, finishing the hypothetical enemy off.
“Nice, but how are you going to collect their heads without a sword?” Miyuki stood at the edge of the practice area, leaning casually against a thickly rolled tatami mat, standing on its end.
“I’d send a trainee to do the janitorial work,” Alli replied as she coiled up the chain of her kusarigama. “cause I’d be too busy being awesome. The Abbot General’s put your guy’s building downtown under surveillance; I’m guessing that’s what you came over to find out. Be ready for action later this week, depending on what we find out.”
“Haha, awesome!” Miyuki hopped over the prone training dummies and continued in a lowered voice. “What about the other business? With Mr. Chow’s shipping interests?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Alli replied.
“C’mon, you can tell me.”
Alli stepped up to Miyuki, placed her arms around Miyuki’s neck, and pulled her close, so their bodies were pressed together. Loose strands of her golden hair brushed Miyuki’s cheek as she brought her lips inches from Miyuki’s ear.
“Don’t worry about it.” Alli whispered. She let go and walked back toward the light of the dojo hall’s open door and called over her shoulder, “Don’t keep your friend waiting.”

Miyuki entered her apartment to be greeted by the sight of Captain Kirk wrestling with the Gorn Captain in glorious high definition, 42 inches wide on the wall of her living room. There was no more certain sign that Lyta was home again, save when she suddenly appeared from the kitchen with a root beer bottle in one hand, dressed in just her underwear and a t shirt bearing the crest of Guam.
“Miyuki, did you shoot down a drone in the San Bruno Mountains last night?” she asked, the way she might ask someone if they’d overloaded the washing machine.
“Maaaaaybe. Who wants to know?”
“Hang on,” Clarissa said, as she came in the door behind Miyuki. “I thought you said you were at a Chinatown mob meeting.”
“I was, that happened first. Well actually first I was in a secret illegal street race.” Miyuki paused as her eyes met her friends’ inquisitive stares “It was a pretty busy night.”

Description
Millennia ago, when the rest of the world’s population refused to sail out sight of land for fear of never seeing it again, Miyuki’s ancestors first set out in their double-hulled canoes to conquer the world’s largest ocean. As she paddled her surfboard out toward the horizon, a sharp line miles away across the sparkling blue of the Pacific, she liked to imagine herself at the oars of a wa'a kaulua. Unlike her ancestors, however, Miyuki turned back to shore when she judged the swell of the tide was headed her way, paddling the other direction until the wave caught her and began to pull her along.
She gained speed as the wave reached shallower water, standing up on her board as the wave crested, riding up, over, and then shooting sideways into the curl. She could feel the cold spray of the wave closing around her; hear it pounding like a chorus of Heiau Pahu beating all together. The wave began to lose itself in a froth of white foam and she gave the board a final lean, curving back up the collapsing trough and then sailing clear of it entirely, and, for a few exhilarating moments, hanging weightless until she fell back into the icy water’s familiar embrace.

As she waded ashore, she caught sight of a familiar, pale figure dressed all in black, waving to her from amidst the bright collage of sunbathers, towels, and beach umbrellas.
“Hey, Clarissa.”
“Hi Miyuki, glad I found you. C’mon, we have to get to the Asian Art Museum.”
“I…what?”
“We have to get to the Asian Art Museum, right away. I spotted the Oracle Sword there last night.”
“I thought your party was at City Hall.” Miyuki untethered her board from her ankle. “But if the sword’s in a Museum that would seem to mean the treasure hunt’s over.”
“Not the sword itself, a picture of a picture on one of the special exhibition banners outside.”
“I don’t see why exactly this has to happen right now.” Miyuki found herself being propelled toward the stairs up the seawall. “At least let’s go back to my place first so I can change.”
“The Museum’s closed Mondays, and you can change in the car, c’mon.” They had arrived at Clarissa’s Land Rover, and she stopped, apparently unsure which end to bundle Miyuki into.
“Well OK,” Miyuki slid her board through the truck’s tailgate, and slid the wetsuit’s zipper down her back as she walked around the passenger side. “but we really should swing by my place first. Gotta rinse the salt out of everything.”
“What? No, do it later. Yalla imshi. You’re not imshi-ing.”
“Just sayin’. I don’t want to get seawater on your upholstery,” Standing naked behind the passenger door as if it was an old fashioned dressing screen, Miyuki held her wetsuit out for Clarissa to stash with her board. “Do you have anything for me to change into?”

“Sometimes I’m not so sure you don’t do these things on purpose,” Clarissa said as they pulled out of the parking lot and turned uphill toward Miyuki’s apartment. “but don’t think you’re getting out of going to the museum just ‘cause you don’t have any clothes on now.”
“Hey, you’re the one who said I could change in the car, I figured you’d at least have a towel for me.” Miyuki sat low in the passenger seat, legs crossed demurely, arms folded over her bare breasts. The Rover’s high clearance meant the average passerby couldn’t see in, or so she hoped. “I put my suit on at home and walked down here, I was gonna walk home later and take it off. And say what you will, I’m pretty sure they won’t let me in like this.”
“I suppose not. So anyway you know how the Asian Art Museum’s across from City Hall? Well when I came out of the party last night, I was waiting for the valet to bring my car back and they had the big exhibition banners on the front of the Museum all flood lit – it’s a traveling exhibit from the National Museum in New Delhi, by the way – and one of them has a big picture of the Emperor Akbar, and a guy with the Oracle Sword. You’d’ve really liked the party, by the way.”
“Really?”
“Well maybe not the substance of it, that was kinda boring, but there was an open bar and a lot of nice cars. I saw a Maserati going in and some kind of Lamborghini coming out.”
“That reminds me, I saw your phantom Mercedes last night.” Miyuki sank slightly further into the seat as they came to a stop at a red light, and a pair of pedestrians crossed the street in front of them. “There was a Chinatown mob meeting and that car was there – in a parking lot in the San Bruno Mountains.”
“D’you think Levine is mixed up with the Triads?”
“He’s mixed up with the Shanghai Economic and Trade Office, which I’m guessing has something to do with the Chinese consulate, since they have access to a consular car. They’re in it with Triads.” Miyuki caught sight of her apartment building ahead as they turned the corner. “I don’t know what any of that means yet, but some guys are looking into it.”
“Huh.” Clarissa pulled into the driveway and pulled her parking brake up with a substantial heave. “Levine wasn’t at the party last night, but people were clearly expecting him to be.”
The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue. It wasn’t quite noon yet and already warm enough to verge on uncomfortable; as she hopped down to the sidewalk Miyuki reflected that, with the exception of her bare feet on the hot concrete, today was not such a bad day to be naked after all. She stood with her hands on the frame of the Rover’s open passenger door for a few moments trying to think of something clever to say, but seeing a car coming in the distance she finally settled for “Bring my board in, will you?” and disappeared into her building’s front door.

“Christ Murphy, you look like hell.”
“Gee, thanks, Charlie. I’m sure I’ve looked worse.” Several days worth of stubble and lack of sleep made Danny’s face uncharacteristically surly and vicious looking, while a superficial cut on his forehead had gone unbandaged, the trail of dried blood making it look far more impressive than it actually was. He wasn’t wrong, though, he had looked much worse.
“The Chief came in not too long ago, he said to let you know he’s waitin’ for you upstairs.” The FPS guard nodded to the end of the line of the airport-style metal detectors that led to the federal building’s black marble and granite lobby. A gate stood apart at the end, bearing a red and white sign whereupon the Federal Protective Services reminded the public that this entrance was for armed government personnel only. As part of his job Murphy would normally be carrying a concealed weapon at all times, having come directly from the plane from Vandenberg, he was carrying a small arsenal. The guard didn’t blink at any of it though; the Federal law enforcement agencies that operated out of the building had been carrying military grade weapons for decades.

The autumn sun streaming through his office’s floor-to-ceiling windows illuminated the Deputy Director of Operations, Pacific Command from behind, causing his close cropped hair to glow like a small flat halo atop his tan, square-jawed face. He looked unnatural in a polo shirt and khakis, Murphy thought; although really he thought the Chief was pushing his luck in a civilian suit; men like him sprung from the forehead of Joint Special Operations Command fully formed and armored head to toe.
“Murphy, ‘bout damn time, come in. I’ve been in contact with General Wright down at Vandenberg, he forwarded your report. Sit down. That’s not what I called you in for, but since you’re here, run it down.”
Danny covered the relevant facts again, judiciously starting when the first infiltrator attacked, after Lyta had left his room.
“… unfortunately, while trying to subdue the hostile, Agent Weber broke his neck and killed him. When I exited the lab area I found that the prisoner I had taken earlier had crawled over to the window and deliberately cut his throat on a piece of broken glass. He bled out before the medics could stabilize him.”
The Chief stared pensively out the window for a while. Finally he turned and fixed Murphy with his icy blue eyes. “What do you think?”
As a field operative Murphy restricted his report to the facts, analysts would sift through them and offer opinions. That didn’t mean he didn’t have one, of course.
“Well sir, all the gear we recovered was PLA or PLAN issue, down to the scuba tanks. The weapons we recovered were mostly QCW-05s with suppressors, which are only issued to PLA special forces units. I think someone has gone to a great deal of trouble to make us think the Chinese are responsible, but I don’t buy it.”
“You don’t?”
“Give me a few days and I can get you the same stuff locally, but American and European, mostly legally and without too much attention. Hell, it’s probably easier to buy an MP5 on the streets of LA then smuggle guns in from China. It makes sense if these guys were a rapid reaction force deployed directly from a ship or FOB somewhere, but a deployment this far this quick is beyond their capabilities.”
“A sleeper cell somewhere on the west coast certainly isn’t.”
“No sir, but in that case they burned it for nothing. Their best chance of success was in sticking together and moving on their objective; instead they split up, wasted time, and made as much noise as possible. It’s almost like they were trying to fail. Altogether it’s out of character; Beijing is careful as hell, they’re happy to try to intimidate their smaller neighbors, but scrupulously avoid action past a point, especially with us. And they almost never act precipitously, not for anything that needs high level approval, like this. It’s a pretty dangerous escalation for them, and for something that didn’t involve any core national interests.”
Murphy fell silent. He hoped he sounded persuasive. It was all conjecture; the evidence all pointed the other way.
“Uh huh.” It was as much as the Chief was likely to say on the matter, like most people in the intelligence business he wasn’t unnecessarily talkative. “Reason I called you back up here last night, is that flight recorder you brought back from Wonsan. When the Boeing boys cracked it open, they shared the data with CSAF and SecAF, and they didn’t like what they saw. Well, someone at the Pentagon didn’t. PRISM’s been goin’ nuts for any mention of a DoD black project called MARIPOSA. Ever heard of it?”
“No sir.”
“Well it’s heard of you.” The Chief slid a single sheet of paper across his desk, which Danny recognized as the printed copy of an NSA signals intercept. “Apparently you’re on the disclosure list, and the Pentagon wants this run to earth.”
Danny took a look at the intercept sheet. Two phones, both pre-paid mobiles from a no-name carrier; one had texted the other a single word: MARIPOSA. “Do you have a brief on what this project is supposed to be about? Would be handy to know what I’m looking for before I start looking for it.”
“No idea. You’re on the disclosure list, and you’re there by yourself. Go home and get some sleep, you look like hell. You can pick this up tomorrow.”

Danny stopped by his desk on his way back out; if he could send off a few preliminary emails now he’d have answers coming in to his phone early tomorrow morning. Or at the very least he’d have responses, since responses wouldn’t necessarily contain answers. As he unslung his HK 416 Rifle and laid it across his desk blotter, he saw that in his absence his office line had begun to accrue voicemails.
“Hello Daniel, this is Todd Lundberg calling from the GSA, I just wanted to follow up on my request last Tuesday of your GSA3609 form for August…” Murphy deleted the message. Todd Lundberg could keep on waiting.
“Hey man, it’s Gus. C’mon down to the motor pool when you’re back in, I got somethin’ you’re gonna like.” Gustavo was the Agency’s local motor pool mechanic; he was always looking for ways to make the vehicle fleet more interesting, and had adopted Danny as his co-conspirator. At the very least, Monday was starting to look up.
“Agent Murphy, this is Special Agent Al Gomez from the FBI Pacific Rim Organized Crime Task Force, I got a flag from the NCIC about a case I’m working on – they’re telling me it’s a DHS matter and to bring you in. We already have an ICE liaison on the team so I don’t know what this is about, but I’d like to clear this, and SFPD Homicide would too, so give me a call…” Gomez sounded exasperated, and probably would have been doubly so if he knew Murphy didn’t actually work for Homeland Security and was holding up a murder investigation for reasons only remotely connected to his duties and entirely on his own initiative. Murphy had a DHS ID in his office’s wall safe, along with many others, he wrote a reminder to himself to make sure he had it with him tomorrow.
“Good Afternoon Captain Murphy, my name is Travis Howard and I’m calling from the 187th Regimental association. I have a fellow vet who wants to get in touch with you, if you can give me a call between 9 and 5 Eastern at…” Danny took down the number. He sat back in his chair and looked at the wall across from him; a glass frame held a tattered black Taliban flag, surmounted by the divisional patch of the 101st Airborne, the famous “Screaming Eagles”, parent unit to the 187th, and an afghan tulwar.
“Hey, wake up.” Lyta stood in the doorway, looking imposingly professional in a freshly pressed uniform. “I’da thought a good Irish boy would have other places to be on a Sunday morning.”
“I’m an Episcopalian. And not a good one. Chief call you in for something too?”
“Nah, a small plane crashed in the San Bruno Mountains last night, the NTSB onsite guy wants an Air Force rep to come see it, I don’t know why, I guess when it came down it passed through the restricted airspace around SFO or something. Have you always had that sword?”
“Yeah, I bought it at a bazaar in Kandahar on my first tour. I don’t think you’ve seen it before though, it’s been in a box at home. I’ve got a couple of ‘em, actually.”
“Christ, you’re just like my roommate. How many swords does a twenty first century person need?”
“I didn’t get the one I wanted the first time around, so I went back a few times.” Danny looked back at the Taliban flag, summoning the past from deep within the white script of the shahada. “We were on a patrol through the Kandahar bazaar, one of those ‘glad hand the locals, make friends with everyone, but in full battle rattle and anyone who gets too close to the Humvee we threaten to light up’ patrols. You know, civil affairs. Anyway, we’re talking to everyone, buying random stuff to make ‘em happy, spread some money their way. There was plenty of the kinda stuff the guys wanted too; bootleg DVDs, rugs, old Soviet gear, Khyber Pass Enfields, and tulwars. There was this one guy, a Uyghur or Turkmen maybe, and he had this one really unusual sword; he had me draw it to check out the blade, and right then we heard an AK popping away at the other end of the street and then everything kicked off. Like it does in Afghanistan, you know. Anyway, by the time everything was secure again I went back and the guy was gone.”
“Sounds oddly sensible. What made the sword so special, anyway?”
“On the face of it, not a lot. The blade was less curved than the usual tulwar, more like a civil war cavalry saber. The big thing - it’s kinda hard to describe – when I drew it out, it had a pattern weld on the blade that looked like it moved, almost like it had a life of its own. I figured it was probably Indian, since about a third of the way down the blade it had an old Hindu symbol engraved on it.”
“Ooh, was it a guy with an elephant head?”
“Nah, it was pair of eyes, with a third eye opening between them.”

“That church really looks like the spinny part of a washing machine.” As the light went green Clarissa gave the gearshift a flourish and the Land Rover lurched forward. “Also, we need to break in to Professor Levine’s house.”
“Those are certainly two related, coherent thoughts.” Miyuki said, watching the smooth white, upward sweep of St. Mary’s Cathedral pass by her window. She had showered the seawater out of her hair and was now dressed characteristically in a tank top and track pants. “You’re right though.”
“About the church, or about breaking into Levines house?”
“About the church; the spinny part of a washing machine is called the agitator by the way. Although I suppose we may as well break into Levine’s house. We don’t know if he’s working with the Triads or they caused him to disappear, but it’s worth breaking into his house to find out. Why did you want to?”
“I just want to see what books he’s got and I figured his mysterious disappearance was a good excuse. We’re coming up on it now, so check out the exhibit banner on the left.”
The mustachioed face of Abu'l-Fath Jalal ud-din Muhammad Akbar, third and greatest of the Mughal emperors looked benevolently down at them from between a apair of columns on the beaux-arts façade of the Asian Art Museum, while from off the side of the banner someone held a sword up to him pommel first, a sword with three eyes on the scabbard. Inside, a security guard reminded them to turn their phones to silent, and Clarissa presented some kind of credential from the University which managed to get them waved past admissions and into the special exhibit.
The main hall was dominated by the ornate caparison and howdah for a regal processional elephant, worn by a startlingly realistic dummy. The larger statues were on display here as well, a dancing Shiva and pink sandstone Ganesh, Sarasvati seated on a lotus, the invincible goddess Durga standing astride the slain buffalo demon Mahisasura. Miyuki thought the goddess’s eyes followed her as she walked. She stopped and gazed at the serene stone face, incongruous with the active pose of the goddess’s semi-nude body, or the tiger curled around her legs. Each of her many arms brandished a different weapon, save the one that held a severed head by the hair.
“Just like you on a Monday.” Clarissa took her by the arm. “C’mon, the Mughal Empire things are over here.”
The dim side gallery glittered with jewels and gilt, the beautiful and elaborately decorated objets d’art that represented the fusion of Indian and Persian influences in the empire at the height of its power. Above all these were the paintings; miniatures of court life and battles, scenes from love poems, religious stories from Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and, curiously, Islam, each hung in a gilt frame in a small pool of light carefully calculated to illuminate without fading the vivid colors. The painting they were looking for took pride of place in the center of the wall.
The painting in its entirety presented a different image than the segment on the banner outside. Sitting placidly on his golden throne Akbar looked on as did a crowd of courtiers and soldiers. In their midst, a man with a shaved head appeared to have entered a trance of some kind, dancing rhythmically while holding the sword above his head; the stylized lack of diminution in the perspective only made it look as if it was being held out to the Emperor, and yet he was gesturing as if he were reaching out for it.
“The Emperor Akbar the Great receives an Oracle in the Diwan-I-Khas.” Miyuki read from the placard. “I think we’ve got some critical info here, it says here it’s gouache on paper.”
“Well you could keep reading, but it doesn’t get very specific. I could tell you most of this.” Clarissa slipped her phone out as she talked and nonetheless made a note of the painting’s name and catalog number. “Akbar was a Muslim, but despite the largely exclusive nature of Islam he was extremely tolerant toward the other religions in India, to the extent that he had the Ramayana translated so he could learn more about it. He married both a Hindu and a Christian along with his Muslim wife without forcing either to convert… he said it brought him closer to his people. And remember this is at a time when he didn’t have to do any of that, the Mughals were a conquering army, they ruled by force, but Akbar knew the key to long term stability was the consent and cooperation of the governed. There is something useful here though.”
“What’s that?”
“The Diwan-I-Khas is the hall of private audience, which would be reserved for audiences with members of the imperial court or state visitors. Members of the public would have an audience in the Diwan-I-Am. So our friend was important enough to get an official state audience. And judging from his saffron robe and lack of hair and a beard he’s meant to be a Buddhist monk or holy man.”
“Buddhism itself doesn’t have oracles, although it kinda sucks up things from indigenous religions, our version is pretty Shinto-ized, mainstream Japanese Buddhism even more so.” Miyuki cocked her head sideways as she examined the figure at the center of the painting. “Also, we wear black.”

Lyta followed her directions up the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway to a narrow access road, blocked by a pair of orange cones and a white Ford Explorer belonging to the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Department. She presented her ID to the accompanying deputy without comment, and only when he backed his vehicle out of the way did she see the badly twisted metal gate lying in the scrub beyond.
She followed the winding road past a number of tall, spidery metal broadcast towers, until it ended in a small parking lot, overflowing with official vehicles. She slid her motor pool Charger in between a North County Fire Authority SUV and a white utility van with government plates, and climbed out of the air conditioned interior. The air outside was hot and very still, and the golden hills around her hummed with insects. A small knot of men stood in the shadow of the broadcast tower where the pavement ended, and she headed toward them.
“Someone call for the Air Force?”
“Yeah, that’d be me.” A thickset man in a navy polo shirt and Day-Glo orange vest with “NTSB” printed in large black letters on the back detached himself from the others. “Carl Rasmussen, NTSB.”
“Lieutenant Hippolyta Rodriguez, DHS AFSOC liason. Whattaya got for me?”
“It’s down over there.” Rasmussen nodded toward the pathless slope, covered in short grass and scrub, and cast a doubtful glance at the high heels Lyta wore with the short skirt of her Service Dress Uniform.
“Lead on.”
Rasmussen had a practical, blue-collar sensibility to him, Lyta thought that he probably wouldn’t have called her if he didn’t feel it was absolutely necessary. Down the slope she could see two more NTSB agents standing near a large black scar on the mountain, burned clear of grass and scrub. It was far too small to be the impact site of a full sized commercial airplane; even a small, single-engined civilian craft would have left more debris.
“Right here.” Rasmussen nodded to a chunk of charred twisted metal, half buried in the ground. Despite the damage, Lyta recognized it instantly.
“That’s an MQ-9. Or what’s left of one, at least. What’s it doing here?”
“That’s what I was hoping you could tell me. Looks like someone shot it full o’ holes, but what brought it down was when one of the wings smacked the tower back there.”
“If the Air Force lost one, we’d have a team out here before they called you. Anything with a number survive?”
“Yeah, under that tarp there. Jerry, pull ‘er back, will ya?”
Under the tarp were the bent remains of an electrically driven 6-barrelled M-134 minigun, and the lower vertical stabilizer of the drone, badly mangled but intact; it had apparently torn off and been thrown clear before the fire started.
“Air Force tail numbers for drones start with AF,” Lyta began slowly, “for the Border Patrol they start ‘CPB’, and NASA has the NASA logo.”
“But this, though…” Rasmussen trailed off. The tail number remained perfectly legible, and they both recognized it; a six digit letter-number combination starting with N, a tail number for a civilian craft.
“But I don’t know what to make of that. And that’s trouble.”

Lyta had planned to go straight home from the crash site, but she decided she’d better swing back by the office after all. At the bottom of the hill where the access road met the Parkway, she stopped while the deputy moved his truck out of the way. While the Charger sat idling Lyta gave the damaged gate a casual glance, and then froze. Right at the point of impact was a smudge of paint, a very distinct, and familiar, shade of fluorescent lime.

The sun was low in the sky by the time Clarissa’ Land Rover pulled up in front of the nijumon of the Japantown temple, causing the large granite lanterns that flanked the entrance to cast long sinister shadows across the warm pavement. Miyuki led the way into the complex while Clarissa stayed close by. Past experience had made her aware of the many possible dangers that lurked in the shadows, and while ultimately she had been granted acceptance by the ninja community, it had only been after much deliberation. She had no illusions as to what would have happened to her had they not. Amid the chirp of crickets and the distant sound of traffic they heard a rhythmic clinking of metal on metal that grew progressively louder as Miyuki led them toward the armory.

Brother Armorer Greene brought out a small wood table and chairs and the three of them sat outside under a string of paper lanterns in the gathering dusk; the heat of the forge made the public part of the armory unbearable. A boy brought a teapot and three cups, and then vanished into the shadows.
“Gen Ma Cha,” Greene said as he filled their cups. “Brown rice tea, the people’s tea. Shincha is considered the premium Japanese tea, I’ve always liked this better.”
“Yeah, me too.” Miyuki held her cup in both hands and sipped gently. The familiar taste of green tea intermingled with roasted rice always reminded her a little of her childhood.
“Well, on to business.” Greene placed Miyuki’s Xerox of the Oracle sword on the table. “From this picture, plus a few others, I’d say your sword is likely a Chinese dao; the fittings are from Nepal, Tibet, or Bhutan, probably from the 17th or 18th century, while the blade is much older – you’ll note that Qing dynasty dao blades are often more flared at the end, but it’s the mottling of the steel that gives it away. It was probably forged in northern India or the Himalayas, a very long time ago.”
“You have other pictures?” Clarissa had been leaning forward; she sat abruptly upright and almost elbowed her tea cup off the table.
“One or two.” Greene took the pot by its handle and methodically refilled their cups. “Luckily the Morioka boys digitized all our records for us a few years ago, this would have taken years for me to find the old fashioned way. Anyway, this one is about 36” long, with a 30” blade, which is typical for Tibetan Oracle Swords.”
“There’s more than one? So it isn’t unique?” Miyuki asked. She hadn’t thought she was as invested in the search as Clarissa, and the notion was surprisingly disappointing.
Greene laid another printout on the table, this time an old color photo, scanned and enlarged. In it, a much younger Brother Armorer, tall and thin and dressed in a Nehru jacket, stood with a portly man in a red monk’s robe, with a shaved head.
“Not exactly.” Greene paused while he cast his mind back in time, it had been decades. “This is me with the Nechung Oracle, in India some years ago. The Nechung Oracle is the state oracle to the Dalai Lama; he’s the most important, but still one of many. Properly, this man is the medium. In the Tibetan tradition, the oracle is a spirit of some kind, an entity that possesses a human medium, known as the kuten, and passes along its revelation.”
Miyuki set her cup down and started to ask a question, but Greene held his hand up and she stopped.
“This is the old religion, little sister. There are gods and demons that have lived in those mountains since before the coming of Buddhism, longer than anyone can remember. Anyway, when the possession takes hold, the kuten moves around, sometimes unpredictably, brandishing a sword. Done right he’s also wearing 70 lbs of mirrored armor. He can’t move in it normally, that’s how you know who’s in control.”
“But this sword we’re looking for gets handed around.” Clarissa prodded the Xerox. “I’m admittedly only familiar in passing with Bonpo and the Himalayan oracular tradition, but this seems to work by a different set of rules entirely.”
“It does.” Greene set down another printed page, this time a scan of a document, handwritten in simple but elegant Japanese calligraphy. The ink appeared faded, the rice paper well worn. “Toward the end of the Heian period, shortly before the outbreak of Genpei War, our honored Abbot General Koryu traveled to China to perfect his understanding of Dharma at the Linji school. While he was there, he also went to Shaolin. He doesn’t say why, but probably to see their kung fu. He was one of us, after all.
“While he was staying there, he met another monk, who he calls a ‘red monk from the west,’ a monk, Koryu says, of great piety and physical courage but no learning, a man chosen solely to bear a sword to the Abbot of Shaolin.” Greene laid another page down, a continuation of the scanned scroll, but this page bore an ink brush drawing, which, in a few elegant strokes, illustrated the essential qualities of a sword with three eyes inscribed on the blade. “The way Abbot General Koryu describes it, whoever the sword was given to could become the kuten.”
Greene fell silent, and the three sat quietly over their tea. A deep, unearthly gonging noise boomed in the distance; the monks had struck the bonsho, the massive bronze bell that hung in the temple’s forecourt, to summon their brothers to meditation.
“Brother Armorer,” Miyuki began as the bell’s reverberations died away. “You mentioned the pattern of the metal being distinctive, but I don’t see it in any of these pictures.”
“It’s visible in the photos.” Greene placed a small stack of photos on the table, the last of his papers. “These are the archive prints so I need to give them back, but we can make copies.”
They were black and white, but nonetheless clear and expertly taken. The sword rested on a platform, apparently in front of a statue of a bodhisattva, surrounded by candles and a handful of ceremonial items. Then it was obligingly held up for the camera by an ancient man in the loose robes and high, fin-shaped hat characteristic of the Gelug monks of Tibet, then the monk stood with an acolyte next to a white stone stupa decked with flags, in a bleak, rocky landscape entirely devoid of plant life. Then more close ups of the sword being held, one with a Nordic looking man holding up a tape measure to the blade. The close ups showed a flowing, watery pattern of metals within the blade, the “Damascus” pattern famed throughout pre-industrial Europe and Asia for its durability and ability to hold an edge.
“Do you know when were these taken?” Clarissa slid the photo of the sword on its altar from the bottom of the stack and peered closely at the many curious objects in it.
“1939. It’s on the back.” Greene flipped over one of the other photos. Along with a handwritten date it bore a pair of stamps – one from the War Department indicating it was from one of several sets of duplicates acquired in 1945, the other a faux-viking insignia of a sword surrounded by a loop of text, designed to look vaguely like runes.
“The Deutsches Ahnenerbe!” Clarissa gasped. By the light of the lanterns, Miyuki thought she might have gone a shade paler, if that was at all possible.
“Uh huh.” Greene finished his tea, and poured himself another cup. “One of our guys was working intelligence during the war, and passed on anything he thought we oughta know about. He was translating things from Japanese, of course, and these came from the Japanese, but more than that I can’t tell you.”

“So,” Miyuki began casually, as the girls walked back toward the temple gate, “What exactly is this German herbal business anyway?”
“The Deutsches Ahnenerbe.” Clarissa corrected her, “It was an academic institute founded in Germany in the 30s, although it really just functioned as a branch of the Nazi party. Their original mandate was to research the origins of the Aryan race, to give an anthropological basis to the Nazi’s racial theories.”
“Well, that’s… unfortunate I guess.”
“That’s not all of it though, The Ahnenerbe fell under the direct control of Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS. He redirected the society’s efforts based on his own beliefs in the occult, digging into some pretty dark things.” Clarissa paused, and looked into the flickering light of a nearby lantern. “The kinds of things we shouldn’t believe in anymore.”
“Didn’t do him much good in the end though, did it?” Miyuki stopped and grabbed Clarissa by the arm. “Hang on, I have one more stop to make while we’re here. Wait for me by the gate, and, um, don’t wander off.”

Alli stood in a circle of enemies, or rather, two concentric circles of targets that symbolized enemies; anthropomorphic wood dummies, much scarred by long years of regular use. The stone floor of the practice yard was still warm under her bare feet; she had started her workout when the sun was higher in the sky and as night began to fall was wet with perspiration, though clad only in a sports bra and shorts. There was no trainer to order her to start, she would strike when ready.
Her weapon, the kusarigama, consisted of a kama, a one handed sickle, which was attached by a long chain to a heavy iron weight. As she sprang into action, the sickle slashed across the faces and chests of the near dummies, while the chain shot out and snaked back, the iron weight striking the heads of the far dummies with skull-splitting force. Shifting her footwork she then whirled the chain in a series of entangling movements, ensnaring the necks, arms, and legs of the dummies and pulling them to the ground, where a quick strike from the kama added one more scar to the wood, finishing the hypothetical enemy off.
“Nice, but how are you going to collect their heads without a sword?” Miyuki stood at the edge of the practice area, leaning casually against a thickly rolled tatami mat, standing on its end.
“I’d send a trainee to do the janitorial work,” Alli replied as she coiled up the chain of her kusarigama. “cause I’d be too busy being awesome. The Abbot General’s put your guy’s building downtown under surveillance; I’m guessing that’s what you came over to find out. Be ready for action later this week, depending on what we find out.”
“Haha, awesome!” Miyuki hopped over the prone training dummies and continued in a lowered voice. “What about the other business? With Mr. Chow’s shipping interests?”
“Don’t worry about it.” Alli replied.
“C’mon, you can tell me.”
Alli stepped up to Miyuki, placed her arms around Miyuki’s neck, and pulled her close, so their bodies were pressed together. Loose strands of her golden hair brushed Miyuki’s cheek as she brought her lips inches from Miyuki’s ear.
“Don’t worry about it.” Alli whispered. She let go and walked back toward the light of the dojo hall’s open door and called over her shoulder, “Don’t keep your friend waiting.”

Miyuki entered her apartment to be greeted by the sight of Captain Kirk wrestling with the Gorn Captain in glorious high definition, 42 inches wide on the wall of her living room. There was no more certain sign that Lyta was home again, save when she suddenly appeared from the kitchen with a root beer bottle in one hand, dressed in just her underwear and a t shirt bearing the crest of Guam.
“Miyuki, did you shoot down a drone in the San Bruno Mountains last night?” she asked, the way she might ask someone if they’d overloaded the washing machine.
“Maaaaaybe. Who wants to know?”
“Hang on,” Clarissa said, as she came in the door behind Miyuki. “I thought you said you were at a Chinatown mob meeting.”
“I was, that happened first. Well actually first I was in a secret illegal street race.” Miyuki paused as her eyes met her friends’ inquisitive stares “It was a pretty busy night.”