SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 46:
The southern half of the building had racks, but crates and a jumble of loose gear were piled in the aisles. Daniel saw the noses of several missiles facing out from the other half of the building, but there were boxes in front of them and more on top. From what he could tell at a quick glance, much of what was stored here was junk.
The guide started off again; Hogg thrust the barrel of his impeller out like traffic barrier. “Come look over the boat with me, buddy,” he said. “It won’t take a minute if everything’s the way it should be, and I guess you can straighten things out for us if it’s not.”
“It’s all right,” the Bennarian said sullenly. He turned without objection, though. “Anyway, what do I know about boats?”
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 64:
James Nichols was trying to hide his genuine surprise at finally seeing Ruy Sanchez in the flesh. Surprise so great that it bordered on outright shock. The man didn’t look at all the way he’d thought he would, from Sharon’s letters.
He realized now, in retrospect, that he should have been prepared. His daughter was the sort of person who always responded to problems of a personal nature by what he’d come to think of as the “Sharon pre-emptive strike.”
And if you think THAT’s bad, Daddy dearest, lemme tell you what else—
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 63:
But no sooner did they reach the front door to the embassy than their plans got scrambled. The big double doors were yawning wide before the servant who was preparing to open it for them got within ten feet.
Through it came Sharon’s father, Melissa Mailey, and Tom and Rita Simpson. Behind them, Sharon could see a few members of the military escort that would have shepherded them to Rome.
“You bums!” Sharon wailed. “You’re not supposed to be arriving for at least two more days!”
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 45:
CHAPTER 12: Bennaria
The spacer from the Armed Squadron unlocked the riverside wicket in the fence surrounding the Pool; he gave it a tentative push. The vines growing through the wire meshes held it closed. “It’s stuck,” he said to Daniel in apparent surprise.
Woetjans stepped past Daniel and gripped the frame with both hands. Planting her left boot on the gatepost, she pulled hard. The gate opened; the thicker woody stems popped like burning brushwood.
“Bloody hell,” the Bennarian said when he got a good look at the bosun. Unlike the Sissies he didn’t have light-enhancing goggles and Bennaria’s moon, though full, was too small to be more than a gleam in the haze. “You’re a big one, ain’t you!”
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 62:
CHAPTER 23
Rome
“Well, that could’ve gone better,” Sharon said to Ruy after seeing Frank and Giovanna out.
“Frank is not so young a man as he once was, Sharon,” Ruy said, in that rumbling he-man voice he put on when he thought she wasn’t been too smart.
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 44:
“Well, you’re off the hook now, at least,” Luff said. He was tight-faced and glared straight ahead, though Daniel doubted that he was looking at anything beyond the sheet of one-way glass between them and the cab. “Are you going to go straight back to Cinnabar?”
Daniel pursed his lips, wondering how to respond. Before he decided, Luff added, “I wish I could go back with you. I wish I’d never taken this bloody job, but I had no choice!”
A gang of children, the oldest of them no more than twelve, stood in a side street. They shouted something unintelligible when they saw the car and several threw stones; the driver accelerated. Hogg rose to his feet so that he could shoot over the driver’s head if he had to, but in the event he kept the squat pistol down by his side.
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 61:
Sharon decided to try firmness. “Please, Your Eminence, stop beating about the bush. I’m a doctor, for goodness’ sake. You can bet I’ve heard much weirder things than you have in store. And it might be that I’ll have to say no, and you can heave a sigh of relief.”
“I must apologize once again. So, I screw up my meager courage. Dottora Ambassadora,” he said, and she caught that he had suddenly started using her other title, which couldn’t have been idly done since he’d completely left it out so far, “I must ask what contact you have with the Committee of Correspondence in Rome? And whether they would follow directions if you were to communicate them?”
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 43:
“I suppose you’re used to this sort of thing,” Luff said bitterly as he started around the Council Hall with Daniel, toward the enclosed parking lot in back. There were clots of spectators at the rear of the plaza, watching but unwilling to be said to have joined the mob. Corius’ voice through the PA system was audible though individual words weren’t always clear. “Because your father’s Speaker Leary, I mean.”
I wonder who told him that? thought Daniel. He was pretty sure Luff hadn’t known that Daniel was anything more than a young middle-ranking officer when the Princess Cecile landed on Bennaria.
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 60:
Barberini offered her his arm. “Let me show you around some of the things we have here, dottoressa. Doubtless you have heard the stories of Barberini peculation?” Not waiting for her to acknowledge the reference to the principal charge against his family’s tenure in the papacy, he added, with a sly smile, “I should like to show you what it has bought.”
“I should like that very much indeed, Your Eminence,” she said, and that was the plain truth. The place had more art about the place than any museum she’d been in back in the up-time US, although her experience in that line hadn’t been much. She wasn’t a great connoisseur of art, really, but she’d tried not to be a complete philistine. And Cardinal Mazzare had told her that the collection that this man had assembled was, in the twentieth-century Rome that Mazzare had worked in as a young priest, the nucleus of the Italian state’s national art collection, in a museum housed in this very palazzo. So she was getting a tour of one of Europe’s better art collections conducted by one of Europe’s leading patrons of the arts who was also, despite being only three or four years older than Sharon herself, recognized as one of the leading experts in the field as well.
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 42:
Tovera remained outside with the gunners, exchanging nods with Adele. Krychek closed the door–the hatch–behind them and gestured graciously toward the chairs on the level below. “Please,” he said, “sit and make yourselves comfortable. Mundy, will you have another glass of wine? And Master Elemere–”
“Elemere,” the singer said sharply. “Just Elemere.”
“As I am Krychek!” said the captain with boisterous good humor, linking arms with Elemere and leading him down the stairs. “I fear your tastes may be too sophisticated for my poor cellar, but please–will you do me the honor of drinking a tot of Landholder Reserve cognac with me? The run was bottled at my birth.”
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