Honorverse favorite passages

roseandheather wrote:Slander and lies. *innocent whistle*

roseandheather wrote:Now here's a heart-wrencher for the romantics in the crowd:

"[Hyacinth] may not be as over as you'd like, Love. It's just as 'over' as it's going to get."

"Oh, Aivars!" [Sinead] put her arms around him, laying her head across his chest, feeling the hard beat of his heart against her cheek, and tried not to weep. Tried not to show her fierce, bitter anger at the orders which were taking him away from her once more. Tried not to feel anger at the Admiralty for issuing them, or at him for accepting them.

"I love you very much, you know," she said quietly, not a trace of anger or resentment or fear in her voice.

"I know," he whispered, holding her tightly. "Believe me, I know."

"And I don't want you to go," she went on, closing her eyes. "You've done enough—more than enough. And I almost lost you once. I thought I had lost you, and the thought of losing you again, for good, terrifies me."

"I know," he whispered yet again, arms tightening about her with a welcome pain. But he didn't say "I won't go," and she fought down another spike of anger. Because he couldn't say it. He could never say it and be the man she loved. Hyacinth had wounded him in so many, many ways, yet the man she had always known was in there still. She knew it, and she clung to the knowledge, for it was her rock.

"I don't want you to go," she repeated, pressing her face into his chest. "Even though I know you have to. But you come back to me, Aivars Terekhov. You come back to me!"

"I will," he promised, and felt a single, scalding tear on his chest. He hugged her more tightly still, and neither of them spoke again for a long, long time. There was no need, for in all the forty-three T-years of their marriage, he had never broken a promise to her. Nor would he break this one . . . if the choice was his.

The Shadow of Saganami

hanuman wrote:
It let's you appreciate the sacrifices military families have to make, doesn't it?

Honor's grief for her own dead would never fade entirely, yet it had been worth every moment of heartbreaking labor, every instant of self-doubt and determination, to witness that. To hear the hidden consternation in the Havenite admiral's voice as he acknowledged Admiral D'Orville's courteous welcome. To watch the faces of the Havenite officers as they endured the remorseless barrage of courtesy visits D'Orville had arranged to make them comfortable—and to drive home the warning that Basilisk was Manticoran territory and would remain so—before they were finally allowed to depart once more with their tails figuratively between their legs.

And then, at last, there had been the voyage home, accompanied by an honor guard of an entire superdreadnought battle squadron while the Manticoran anthem played over every Navy transmitter in the system. Honor had thought her heart would burst when D'Orville's stupendous King Roger flashed her running lights in the formal salute to a fleet flagship as Fearless entered the terminus to transit home, yet under her pride and bittersweet joy had been a fear she dared not admit. All the time the repair ships had labored upon her battered command, Honor had made herself believe Fearless might be returned to service, but the yard techs' survey had killed that hope.

Fearless was too old. She was too small, and she'd taken too much. Given too much. Repair would require virtual rebuilding and cost as much as a newer, bigger ship, and so the decision had been made. Within the week, she would be towed out of her slip once more and delivered to the breakers at one of the orbital recovery stations, where she would be stripped, cut into jagged chunks of alloy by workers who could never truly understand all she had been and meant and done, and melted down for reclamation.

She deserved better, Honor thought, blinking on her tears once more, but at least she'd ended as a warrior. Ended in combat and then brought her surviving people home, not died in her sleep after decades in mothballs. And even when she was gone, something of her would remain, for HMS Fearless had been added to the RMN's List of Honor, the list of names kept perpetually in commission by new construction to preserve the battle honors they had earned.

cthia wrote:

hanuman wrote:
It let's you appreciate the sacrifices military families have to make, doesn't it?

Indeed it does. Indeed, it does.

****** *

On Basilisk Station

Honor's grief for her own dead would never fade entirely, yet it had been worth every moment of heartbreaking labor, every instant of self-doubt and determination, to witness that. To hear the hidden consternation in the Havenite admiral's voice as he acknowledged Admiral D'Orville's courteous welcome. To watch the faces of the Havenite officers as they endured the remorseless barrage of courtesy visits D'Orville had arranged to make them comfortable—and to drive home the warning that Basilisk was Manticoran territory and would remain so—before they were finally allowed to depart once more with their tails figuratively between their legs.

And then, at last, there had been the voyage home, accompanied by an honor guard of an entire superdreadnought battle squadron while the Manticoran anthem played over every Navy transmitter in the system. Honor had thought her heart would burst when D'Orville's stupendous King Roger flashed her running lights in the formal salute to a fleet flagship as Fearless entered the terminus to transit home, yet under her pride and bittersweet joy had been a fear she dared not admit. All the time the repair ships had labored upon her battered command, Honor had made herself believe Fearless might be returned to service, but the yard techs' survey had killed that hope.

Fearless was too old. She was too small, and she'd taken too much. Given too much. Repair would require virtual rebuilding and cost as much as a newer, bigger ship, and so the decision had been made. Within the week, she would be towed out of her slip once more and delivered to the breakers at one of the orbital recovery stations, where she would be stripped, cut into jagged chunks of alloy by workers who could never truly understand all she had been and meant and done, and melted down for reclamation.

She deserved better, Honor thought, blinking on her tears once more, but at least she'd ended as a warrior. Ended in combat and then brought her surviving people home, not died in her sleep after decades in mothballs. And even when she was gone, something of her would remain, for HMS Fearless had been added to the RMN's List of Honor, the list of names kept perpetually in commission by new construction to preserve the battle honors they had earned.

This was a very emotional scene for me, not least because Honor finally got recognition with her name up in lights...but Fearless ... sweet... Fearless, who lived up to her name, while blowing defiance out her wedge 'You...will...not...kill...my...commander.'

phillies wrote:

cthia wrote:Besting my sister and niece at Scrabble is a copper-plated Cordelia Ransom. It's simply impossible to win at this game against someone who snacks on crossword puzzles and are veritable encyclopedists! Who does an entire book of crossword puzzles in a day?!

Give them London Times crossword puzzles. See if they can figure out the clues when they have the answers.

Trooper; medicos (7 letters) That's an *easy* one.

However, coming back on topic, now that I mention it, many of these people do not seem to have any hobbies, so I would need to search for a quote for you.

phillies wrote:
Was this a fifteen second puzzle, or a thirty second puzzle?

Mission of Honor

[on Honor's Nouveau Paris soirée ]

“ ‘Dramatic’ is one way to put it, all right,” Stan Gregory, the Secretary of Urban Affairs agreed wryly.
He was one of the secretaries who’d been out of the city last night. In fact, he’d been on the opposite side of the planet, and he’d been up and traveling for the better part of three hours to make this early morning meeting. Which didn’t keep him from looking brighter-eyed and much more chipper than Pritchart herself felt at the moment.”
“Dropping in on you literally in the middle of the night was a pretty flamboyant statement in its own right, Madam President,” he continued. “The only question in my mind is whether it was all lights and mirrors, or whether Admiral Alexander-Harrington simply wanted to make sure she had your attention.”
“Personally, I think it was a case of . . . gratuitous flamboyance, let’s say.” Rachel Hanriot’s tone could have dehumidified an ocean, despite the fact that the Treasury Secretary was one of Pritchart’s staunchest allies. “I’m not saying she’s not here in a legitimate effort to negotiate, understand. But the entire way she’s made her appearance—unannounced, no preliminary diplomacy at all, backed up by her entire fleet, arriving on the literal stroke of midnight in an unarmed civilian yacht and requesting planetary clearance . . .”
Her voice trailed off, and she shook her head, and Denis LePic snorted in amusement.
“ ‘Gratuitous flamboyance’ or not, Rachel,” the Attorney General said, “it certainly did get our attention, didn’t it? And, frankly, given the way things’ve gone ever since Arnold got himself killed, I’m in favor of anything that moves us closer to ending the shooting before everything we’ve managed to accomplish gets blasted back to the stone age. So if Alexander-Harrington wanted to come in here naked, riding on the back of an Old Earth elephant, and twirling flaming batons in each hand, I’d still be delighted to see her!”

“I could have just taken the fire,” Honor replied flatly. “Look at how few people we lost anyway! I could’ve waited to be sure—”

“Oh, stop it!” Thomas Theisman snapped, and Honor’s head snapped around in surprise at the genuine anger in his voice.

“No, you could not have ‘just taken the fire’!” the Republic’s Secretary of War told her sharply. “And if you had done something that stupid, you’d deserve to be broken for it!”

“But—”

“Don’t you ‘but’ me! You didn’t know—you couldn’t know—if they’d come up with some kind of fire control fix we’d never heard of before. You had no right, not one shred of a moral justification, to risk the lives of personnel under your command just because somebody on the other side had done something suicidal! Your responsibility is to your people, not theirs! It’s your job to neutralize an enemy before he kills them, and you’d damned well better do it if you’re going to be worthy of the uniform you wear!”

His brown eyes blazed, and she tasted the white-hot fury, the total sincerity, behind them.

“That’s your responsibility, Admiral Harrington, and you lived up to it! You reacted to the threat you knew about, the one you saw, and I was right there on that flag bridge with you. It took those missiles three minutes to reach us, and you had a Hermes buoy sitting right off his flagship’s bow. There was plenty of time for him to get on the com and tell you the launch was a mistake, if he hadn’t meant to launch it! Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t believe he did that, now did he? Not only that, but thirteen-second lag or not, the rest of his damned fleet was firing full broadsides at you on its heels! I understand that realizing you gave the order to kill that many people has to make you sick to your stomach. It makes me want to puke, and I didn’t have to give it. But the only ones responsible for what happened to Filareta and the people under his command are whoever arranged to get him sent here and—assuming there’s any basis to all this speculation in the first place—whoever got to his tac officer. Not you; not me—them!”

roseandheather wrote:And this is why I am dead certain that Thomas Theisman and Honor Harrington were destined to become lifelong best friends.

hanuman wrote:

roseandheather wrote:And this is why I am dead certain that Thomas Theisman and Honor Harrington were destined to become lifelong best friends.

I'm not even tempted to tease you. They are so much alike, aren't they? I honestly think we need to convene a convention of as many treecats as possible on Sphinx, because if there is one two-leg in the entire universe who is guaranteed to be adopted, it has to be Tom Theisman.

hanuman wrote:

roseandheather wrote:And this is why I am dead certain that Thomas Theisman and Honor Harrington were destined to become lifelong best friends.

I'm not even tempted to tease you. They are so much alike, aren't they? I honestly think we need to convene a convention of as many treecats as possible on Sphinx, because if there is one two-leg in the entire universe who is guaranteed to be adopted, it has to be Tom Theisman.