Honorverse favorite one-liners

Slaver crews, no matter how vigilant and well-armed, had no more chance of resisting a full-bore close assault by Torch units trained to Solarian Marine standards than vigilant and toothy mice had of resisting bobcats. There wasn’t even much chance that the cargo would get harmed, so swiftly and savagely would the attack be driven through.

Mobryan wrote:

Alistair wrote:She might be third stellar technically... but when was the last time she attended their church?

What does attendance have to do with belief???

Given what we know about the Third Stellars from text and extrapolating from RFC's likely inspirations, I'd say the church services she is accustomed to resemble an in-home bible study more than anything else.

We know that they consider the individual personally responsible for their own connection to God. We know they facilitate this with services using a bare minimum of structure. We know that even among Third Stellars, the Harringtons belong to a branch even more dedicated to that basic personal responsibility, with plain services entirely lacking in "Fol-de-rol".
We know that there are no fundamental differences with the Church of Humanity.
We know that the Third Stellars, as a whole, are as independent minded a bunch as you will find.

I submit that one of their favorite Bible verses is probably Matthew 18:20 "For where two or three gather in my Name, there I am, among them."

Add in the traditions that RFC likely drew upon, and Honor could go to church with nothing more then a Bible and a couple friends. Maybe a candle, if they wanted to get fancy



Matt

"Emil, don't get started talking shop so quickly!" President Adolfsson scolded with what was obviously a fond smile. "Captain Terekhov's been in-system for less than twelve hours. I think you might give him, oh, another thirty or forty minutes of amiable social chitchat before you dive headlong into all that important stuff."

"Oops." Karlberg shook his head again, this time with an expression strongly reminiscent of a small boy who'd just been told he was too bouncy for polite manners.

"Don't worry," the President assured him. "I won't have you beheaded just yet. It would delay dinner, and getting the gore out of the carpet is always such a pain."

"Well, Commodore, Mr. President," Terekhov said after a few moments of silent thought, "if you do have somebody wandering in and out of your system with less than honest motivations, then I suppose we ought to see what Hexapuma can do to discourage them." He smiled thinly. "As permanently as possible."

Caseyorourke wrote: However I can say I've met some Buddhists who are better Christians than some Christians I know.

All it would take would be for one of the slaver ship’s officers on the bridge to trigger the slave evacuation procedures. The cargo would be forced out of their compartments by poison gas and expelled into vacuum. There would be no logic to doing so, since under the circumstances there was no way the slaver crew could pretend they hadn’t been carrying slaves. Some of the corpses would even be drifting in sight of the Station. But the slavers might figure that they were doomed anyway—not without some reason, being honest—and choose to commit an act of mass murder as a twisted form of reprisal. God knew the slave trade attracted enough sadists and sociopaths! Indeed, one might say that those were two of the trade’s more essential qualities.

cthia wrote:I know that it is because she is an honorable person, with morals, scruples and values. But I always questioned Honor's tendency to give captured pirateers a second chance. A second chance to commit acts like this?

Mobryan wrote:

cthia wrote:I know that it is because she is an honorable person, with morals, scruples and values. But I always questioned Honor's tendency to give captured pirateers a second chance. A second chance to commit acts like this?

However, the ones she spares are those that already had that chance, and didn't take it.


Matt

runsforcelery wrote:First, the individuals discussed in CoG are slavers, not pirates, and the two are not always the same. Among other things, pirates seldom arrange ahead of time to systematically murder their passengers/cargo. Now, admittedly, scratch a pirate and find a slaver in many cases, but not always. You might want to take a look at "Let's Dance" to see her attitude towards Manpower and slavers in general.

Second, the "second chance" she gave wasn't to the pirates, it was to the local authorities who insisted that she hand the pirates over . . . and then frequently let them go again in return for bribes or because they were actively in cahoots with the criminals in the first place. She was willing to abide by their rules and hand pirates over for trial locally only one time, despite their insistence that she was supposed to do so every time under interstellar law. Those pirates also went into her personal data base when she handed them to the locals, however; if she caught them again engaged in the piracy business, she automatically executed them. I fail to see how this is going easy on pirates?

Just saying.

KNick wrote:Now I find myself in a quandary, O great and mighty Mad Wizard Weber. I had always been under the impression that the database was RMN wide. That any pirate entered into that database was incorporated into the whole at the end of each deployment and the updated version was given to every ship before each deployment. That way, any Captain would have the capability to check to see if they had merely changed ships. Was I in error?

I am thinking specifically of Zeno Egervary, the officer from the Marianne. The one who killed Ragnhild Pavletic. He did it because he had already been picked up once.