1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 73:
Within, Quevedo had, to Borja's irritation, retained the street-ruffian attire in which he went about Rome doing Borja's bidding, and had his filthy clogs on the furniture. He made no effort whatsoever to rise on the cardinal's entrance being announced. "Well?" Borja asked, deciding that drawing attention to Quevedo's loutish behaviour would be undignified.
"Your Eminence ought to know that there was rioting at the embassy of the so-called United States of Europe earlier in the evening. Rival gangs brawled in the street outside." Quevedo smiled thinly. "It appears that the ambassador is fomenting unrest of her own, and the rivalry between the insurrectionary factions is spilling into the streets of Rome."
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 54:
Barnes and Dasi followed, forcing the merchants back by their presence; then the whole mixed entourage flowed into the room. Moorer surreptitiously scooped up the pistol and dropped it into a desk drawer.
"We've been trying to get the Governor to act," said Beltras, the man in the string tie. His tone started out resigned but quickly rose into anger. "Will he? No, not him!"
"The EPL commandeers our property and the Governor says, ''Too bad,' that's all!" said Conning. "Some governor. Some government!"
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 72:
"What are they chanting?" Borja asked Ferrigno. The cardinal and his secretary were standing half-way along the drive of the Villa Borja, just about able to see, at a hundred yards' distance, the crowd gathered about the iron gate. Enough of them had torches and lanterns that it was possible to see them, and the lanterns at the gatehouse made them quite acceptably visible. Borja's people had roused him at this late hour—certainly past midnight—in a state of near-panic about a mob at the gates. What was present certainly fit the description well enough. Borja could see, even at this distance and with his ageing eyes, that the assorted refuse who had come to his threshhold were ill-dressed and filthy-looking. He offered a small prayer of thanks that he stood upwind.
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 71:
CHAPTER 26
Rome
Frank returned from the embassy to find his place full of people, most of whom he'd never seen before. Pretty much all the regulars were in, though. And everyone wanted to know if it was true that the Spanish were about to invade. The best Frank could manage was “not right now.” He could tell a lot of folks weren't believing him, but nobody seemed to be calling for barricades and the like yet. In fact, everyone seemed to have settled in for a goodly long evening of drinking, dancing and generally hanging out.
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 53:
Adele intensely disliked using her visor and its simple cursor controls in place of a proper display linked to her wands, but while she was walking down Water Street she didn't have a better option. She was uncomfortably aware that Barnes and Dasi kept step, poised to catch her if she stumbled. It was embarrassing, but falling on her face would be still more embarrassing. That was a real possibility, given the state of the pavement and the fact she was seeing through a 70% mask of projected data.
The half-dozen guards at the entrance to the Federal Building were in laborers' clothes, loose dark trousers and striped shirts, but they all wore the red-and-white EPL rosette somewhere on their garments. They bent their heads close and buzzed to one another as the combined Bennarian and RCN contingent approached; one man scurried inside. None of them had been in the delegation which had visited the Princess Cecile earlier in the afternoon.
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 52:
CHAPTER 14: Ollarville on Dunbar's World
Troops in gray-green battledress were marching off the Greybudd via two of the ship's three ramps. Most of them carried sub-machine guns, but there seemed to be one stocked impeller per ten-man squad.
The ramp closest to the bow had stuck halfway down. Spacers from the Greybudd were looking at it from the quay and the hatchway, but there wasn't the sort of bustle that Daniel liked to see in a crew when something goes wrong. He frowned.
The troops were forming a perimeter, closing off the quay and politely–reasonably politely–but firmly moving out the handful of idlers and dockworkers who were there at the moment. As Daniel and his escort approached, one of the soldiers began talking urgently into a hand-held radio. Another man stepped out of the line with his arm raised in bar.
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 70:
Sharon couldn't tell who was right from the second floor, with the dusk gathering, but the folks out front were starting to spot the oncoming crowd. And the ones who saw what was coming were peeling off from the bunch they were with and getting away. None too slowly, either. In fact, as Frank's impromptu army got closer, the rest realized they were outnumbered and began to run. Some of the front rank from Frank's people dashed after them, but Sharon suspected they wouldn't chase far. Down in the street, lit by the light from the embassy's windows, Frank waved up at what, to him, must have been just silhouettes. Everyone else with him had stopped to shout insults and jeers after the running rentacrowd.
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1635: THE CANNON LAW – snippet 69:
“Ha!” Melissa’s laugh didn’t have much humor in it. “Astroturf. Still, on the bright side, it’ll be the first time the official estimate of the crowd will be more accurate than the protestors’ one.”
“Really?” Sharon’s dad asked.
“Sure. We’d get a couple of hundred thousand marching through Washington. Next day, you’d read in the paper that ‘official estimates’”—she pronounced the words the same way most people would damned lies—”would say that the demonstration consisted of a couple of thousand, most of who had been paid to be there. I wish we had been paid, I’d have had some money back in those days. Now here, we really have got, what, fifty? Sixty? And all paid to be here.”
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 51:
The Greybudd had landed two slips away from the Princess Cecile and the air still roiled with hot steam and the sharpness of ozone from her thrusters. Rust obscured the transport’s number, but a checkerboard of replacement hull plates made Daniel sure of his identification. Besides, Corius would’ve brought his own vessel down first.
He and Adele walked down the boarding ramp to meet the four officials. They wore berets with a red-and-white rosette. Two were in khaki uniforms; one wore a uniform jacket with shapeless blue trousers; and the last had similar trousers, a horizontally striped shirt, and went barefoot.
All wore pistols and belt knives. The barefoot fellow carried a crude-looking shoulder weapon with a drum magazine, probably a shotgun powered by chemical explosives.
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SOME GOLDEN HARBOR – snippet 50:
Adele heard the squeal and clang of a score of hatches all over the ship opening–without orders and by implication against orders. Vesey was rising from the command console. Her pale face flushed. She sat down again hard and reached for the commo switch.
“I wonder, Captain Vesey,” said Daniel very loudly. Despite the pings of differential cooling, the bridge was quiet enough for normal talk now that the thrusters had shut down. Daniel’s volume was suitable for shouting across the harbor. “Would you come here for a moment and see if my course plot agrees with yours?”
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