The journey to Domicile D took less than 20 minutes. Each RSH leader accompanied by one or two fighters from the surface and Rudolph and Callahan the pearman, who was the first to meet the interlopers as an RSH spokesman.
The journey could have taken considerably longer. For one or two it was as fast as ten minutes, but for a party of 11 there was more danger. For the most part they snuck through the alley network that RSH pearmen liked to use; disturbingly filled to the brim with tripwires and plates. Once or twice the surface men tripped a padded plate expecting swift pain or death, but each trap only caused a jingling of nearby discarded metal cans or key chains which produced impotent noise that no one else but they heard. Obviously this was some kind of alert measure, and Rudolph Wernstrom winced each time one was tripped, probably because he would have to reset them at some point.
Before long they'd reached Domicile D, and as soon as they put feet down on the cobblestones within a quarter mile radius of tenement 14, military faces became prevalent among the crowd, and the crowd often parted around them apprehensively. Hooded figures with rubber tubed respirators and herbal air banks on their belts parted for the eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen or however many surface people on their way about surface people's business. Because they were accompanied by five familiar military escorts (the scientist, the dog lady, the beat cop, the sniper, and the hornet) they went unchallenged. Had the four otherwise foreign strangers with that telling lack of radiation enriched skin wandered towards Eisenfaust's place of business they'd have been escorted off the street forcibly and beaten. Rudolph, Mary, and Daniel would have been the only ones among the eleven of their number to have spotted the snipers covering their every move.
With guides in tow no one questioned or hassled the envoys of the Rising Sun House even as they trumped up each stair, through six flights of stairs. Like the House, tenement 14 had in less than five hours been turned into a triage center, an armory, and an intelligence room. Three floors were filled with nothing but the makings of war and sabotage, filled top to bottom with surface people rich healthy colorful skins and strength packed bodies, flitting between jobs-to-do.
The five returned soldiers had spent the whole day patrolling and hadn't been around to witness the almost Athenian inception of Eisenfaust's command center. When they'd left, they'd seen them carry a wooden coffee table up three flights of stairs and hadn't paid attention to anything else. Now the whole floor was covered in people doing 'things', usually collaborating on accounts of the city. Six hours later it was looking pretty packed. Paper, which Mark or Argyle or anyone could have told you was a luxury in Untersina, was scattered everywhere, covering every surface. People seemed to be content with this, as though there were an order to the chaos. When the scouts and patrolmen had left, the fifth and sixth floors had been entering and exiting dozens of airborne scouts on three-dee like some kind of depot and aviary hybrid. Things seemed to have settled down now; either the scouts had run the full length of their course and pushed as deeply into enemy territory as they could safely do, or Eisenfaust had announced a contentment with the volume of reports she'd been getting. Perhaps both had happened at once even, continued happening repeatedly (and Bee could imagine she'd get louder and louder with each announcement) after the first hour of scouting.
In the living room, Eisenfaust is lent over a table with a large map of the undercity drawn on eight or so separate sheets of paper and weighted to the table with rocks and shell casings to keep from blowing away. The map, which hadn't so far as they knew existed when they left, now took up most of the room she'd built it in.
The guards around Eisenfaust tensed up around her in the wake of the rooms eleven new occupants. None of them knew who was in charge, but everyone recognized Atman, her husband, and her keeper.
< "Hang on soldier. What the fuck is this?" >
Theo could have told you he wasn't sure what they meant. When in the service of the king, when someone asked you what the fuck something was, you'd probably stained your coat or torn your sash or forgotten to clean your gun. He wised up soon enough though after that split second of 'oh fuck, I'm being made an example of.'
"They're here to see the Commander. Local philanthropists, and they can lend help."