Honorverse favorite one-liners

kenl511 wrote:"Daddy! Daddy!" The young woman cried as she ran across the carnage.

"Good thing he's a wrestler, otherwise that would have been a take down for sure," Jeremy observed to Donald, beside him.

Changer of Worlds


"What do you think he's saying to her?" Victor asked.
"The important things. I'm sure he already chastised her for using owl by night. Now it is things like he loves her", Kevin answered.

Well, let's see. He's probably stopped chiding her for using the Owl By Night. And he's probably already told her exactly which schools to investigate, once she gets to Manticore." A large hand came up and rubbed his jaw. "So I imagine he's simply telling her the kind of things which she really needs to know. Things from the heart, so to speak."

Janko Horster realized he'd made another mistake, one far worse than failing to open his broadsides earlier. Each of his battlecruisers had twenty-nine tubes in her broadside. With Typhoon gone, that gave him fifty-eight—two-thirds as many as the Manties had—with a minimum cycle time of thirty-five seconds. Worse, his tactical crews had no information at all on the Manties' electronic warfare capabilities, while it was quickly and dismally apparent the Manticoran CO had learned a great deal about his EW during the approach.

His people were doing their best, but seven weeks of combined simulator and hands-on training wasn't enough. It wasn't second nature to them, wasn't instinctive. The slight hesitation in their responses, the friction in the decision loops, might not have been apparent against another Verge navy. But he didn't face another Verge navy. He faced the Royal Manticoran Navy, and that was a mistake few survived.

Hutch wrote:His people were doing their best, but seven weeks of combined simulator and hands-on training wasn't enough. It wasn't second nature to them, wasn't instinctive. The slight hesitation in their responses, the friction in the decision loops, might not have been apparent against another Verge navy. But he didn't face another Verge navy. He faced the Royal Manticoran Navy, and that was a mistake few survived.

For all of its towering reputation, all of its size, all of the wealth and industrial power which stood behind it, the Solarian League Navy was simply outclassed...Despite its preeminent position, the SLN was a second-rate power.

Far, far worse, the men and women of its officer corps didn't even recognize their own inferiority . . . and Josef Byng's ships found themselves matched against what was by almost any measure the most experienced, battle hardened, and technologically advanced fleet in space.

Hutch wrote:His people were doing their best, but seven weeks of combined simulator and hands-on training wasn't enough. It wasn't second nature to them, wasn't instinctive. The slight hesitation in their responses, the friction in the decision loops, might not have been apparent against another Verge navy. But he didn't face another Verge navy. He faced the Royal Manticoran Navy, and that was a mistake few survived.

Amaroq wrote:I think I posted this quote somewhere before in the thread. I love these types of outside perspective pieces of narration (especially when they pertain to the awesomeness of the RMN).

Here's some more from SFtS:

For all of its towering reputation, all of its size, all of the wealth and industrial power which stood behind it, the Solarian League Navy was simply outclassed...Despite its preeminent position, the SLN was a second-rate power.

Far, far worse, the men and women of its officer corps didn't even recognize their own inferiority . . . and Josef Byng's ships found themselves matched against what was by almost any measure the most experienced, battle hardened, and technologically advanced fleet in space.

And little though any Solarian officer wanted to admit it, most of the men and women around Shavarshyan were clearly aware that they were about to go up against an experienced adversary...they were far from immune to the anxious butterflies which always affected the novice when he looked across the field of battle at a grimly prepared veteran foe in battered, well-used armor.

The captain shook his head. "Bernardus, they had everything they needed to equip a battalion of light infantry—modern light infantry—complete with heavy weapons support, buried in that hole in the ground."

"I realize that," Van Dort said.

"You're missing my point. They had it buried in a hole in the ground. Why? If they had this kind of equipment, why weren't they using it? They could've blasted their way right through anything the Kornatian police could put in their way. Hell, for that matter, they could've blasted their way through anything Suka's System Defense Force could have thrown at them, unless the SDF was prepared to resort to saturation airstrikes! Nordbrandt could have invaded the Nemanja Building and taken the entire Parliament hostage on the very first day of her offensive, instead of just bombing it with civilian explosives. So why didn't she?"

Van Dort blinked, then frowned.

"I don't know," he admitted slowly. "Unless they didn't have them then." He inhaled deeply, still thinking. "Maybe you said it yourself. You said they were either suicidal or didn't know what they were doing. Maybe they just hadn't had the weapons long enough."

"That's exactly what I was thinking. But if they didn't have them stockpiled to begin with, where did they come from? How did they get here? I can't believe Nordbrandt had a big enough war chest socked away to pay for them, but the kind of rogue arms dealer who'd deal with someone like her would demand cash in advance, and he wouldn't sell them cheap. So who did pay for them? And when did they deliver them? And while we're asking questions like that, how do we know this is the only stockpile she had?"

"I don't know," Van Dort admitted again. "But I think we'd better find out."

They may have destroyed Camp Freedom, she told herself fiercely, but they don't know about the other arms caches. They don't know the Movement still has modern weapons, still has dozens of times the firepower and capability we had at the beginning!

She told herself that, and resolutely refused to consider the fact that whatever the FAK might have, the government had the Star Kingdom of Manticore.

She smiled back at him and returned her attention to her HUD, and one eyebrow rose as she saw half a dozen patches of plating blowing away from the freighter's hull. One of the sudden openings was almost directly in front of the pinnace, and she saw something in it. It was an indistinct, barely visible shape, but there was something naggingly familiar about that half-glimpsed form, and it seemed to be turning to point in her direction.

God, it's a—!

Ragnhild Pavletic never completed the thought.

There were fifty-seven men and women aboard Marianne before Hexapuma fired. That was an extraordinarily large crew for a merchantship, but then most merchantships never had to worry about cargoes of desperate slaves.

By the time Zeno Egervary's body hit the deck and stopped sliding, there were fourteen still-living men and women aboard the freighter's shredded wreck.

"Then understand this, as well. You've just murdered men and women of the armed forces of the Star Kingdom of Manticore. As such you are guilty, at the very least, of piracy, for which the sentence is death. I suggest, Captain, that you spend the next few minutes trying to think of some reason I might consider letting you continue to live."

Aivars Terekhov smiled. It was a terrifying expression.

"Think hard, Captain," he advised almost gently. "Think very hard."

"She was your friend," Paulo said softly into her ear. "You loved her. Go ahead. Cry for her . . . and then I'll help you do this."

"And you seriously think we could push farther and faster' than the League?" Samantha asked.

"I think we damned well better find out whether or not we can, Mom..."

Why? she wondered. Why does every single idiot in a Navy uniform think the frigging Manties are ten meters tall? Why can’t any of them see that it doesn’t matter how good their damned missiles are? They’re one little pimple of a “star nation,” and Frontier Security should have squashed them years ago instead of letting them get so fucking full of themselves. Them and their precious wormhole. They think it makes them the lords of creation, that their shit doesn’t stink! But they’re about to find out differently, aren’t they? That maniac Gold Peak’s gone too far, and now her precious Star Empire knows exactly how a cockroach feels before the hammer comes down.

My God. The thought hit him like a sudden bucket of ice water. My God, they didn’t just get a com relay that close; they got sensor platforms that close—close enough to read ships’ names off our goddamned hulls—and we never saw a frigging thing!

The implications were terrifying , and he suddenly wished Francisca Yucel was up here in orbit and he was safely down on the planet.