Honorverse favorite passages

dreamrider wrote:Being quite serious, on a morning when I have been making a bunch of puckish comments...

I don't know about how truly close Honor and Thom can ever become. They both know well each others imperatives of duty, yet the fact remains between them that each has been responsible for the deaths of LOTS of the others subordinates, comrades, and friends. It may make it difficult to ever be warm, no matter how much they understand.

Two things stand in favor of the ice cracking on the relationship. One, Honor knows Thom's treecat name. Two, Alfredo Yu.

I look forward to the scene where Honor reintroduces Thom and Alfredo.

dreamrider

Hutch wrote:

dreamrider wrote:Being quite serious, on a morning when I have been making a bunch of puckish comments...

I don't know about how truly close Honor and Thom can ever become. They both know well each others imperatives of duty, yet the fact remains between them that each has been responsible for the deaths of LOTS of the others subordinates, comrades, and friends. It may make it difficult to ever be warm, no matter how much they understand.

Two things stand in favor of the ice cracking on the relationship. One, Honor knows Thom's treecat name. Two, Alfredo Yu.

I look forward to the scene where Honor reintroduces Thom and Alfredo.

dreamrider

Just to spoil the dream, Alfredo and Thomas have met sometime during A Rising Thunder, as both are in the meeting post-2nd Manticore. In fact (I do not have the textev available), Yu posits a question to Tom (as he had done many years before) that leads to the conclusion about the Solly pod-launch.

As for the Honor-Theisman relationship, I recall in ART that Honor compares him with Alistar McKeon and thinks about how similar they are. Given how close they were, I see the same level of comfort and closeness developing between Honor and Theisman....to some extent, it is already there.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

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.

dreamrider wrote:Being quite serious, on a morning when I have been making a bunch of puckish comments...

I don't know about how truly close Honor and Thom can ever become. They both know well each others imperatives of duty, yet the fact remains between them that each has been responsible for the deaths of LOTS of the others subordinates, comrades, and friends. It may make it difficult to ever be warm, no matter how much they understand.

Two things stand in favor of the ice cracking on the relationship. One, Honor knows Thom's treecat name. Two, Alfredo Yu.

I look forward to the scene where Honor reintroduces Thom and Alfredo.

dreamrider

Dame Estelle Matsuko, Knight of the Order of King Roger and Resident Commissioner for Planetary Affairs on the planet Medusa in the name of Her Majesty Elizabeth III, Queen of Manticore and Defender of the Realm, rose behind her desk as her office door slid open. The tall naval commander who stepped through moved with the graceful stride of muscles accustomed to a gravity a great deal higher than Medusa's .85 g, and the treecat on her shoulder looked around with interested green eyes. Dame Estelle examined the pair of them with equal but hidden curiosity even as she extended a hand in welcome.

"Commander Harrington."

"Commissioner." The commander's crisp, clipped accent was as clear an indication of her birth world as the treecat or the way she moved, and her grip was firm but carefully metered. Dame Estelle had felt the same sort of handshake from other Sphinxians—and the few who'd absent-mindedly forgotten to watch what they were doing made her grateful for the ones who remembered.

"Won't you be seated?" Dame Estelle offered as the commander released her hand, and her brain was busy making mental notations.

Harrington carried herself with assurance, and Dame Estelle revised her original age estimate upward by five years. She was a striking woman, with a pale, strongly sculpted face and large, expressive eyes almost as dark as Dame Estelle's own. Her hair was clipped shorter than most men's under the white beret, and she wore an unmistakable air of competent professionalism. A far cry, the commissioner reflected, from the second-raters the Navy had been dumping on her, especially since Janacek took over the Admiralty. Yet there was a tension under Harrington's disciplined surface. An uneasiness. At first she'd thought it was her imagination, but a closer look at the commander's companion had disabused her of that notion. The treecat was curious about his surroundings, yes, but his long, slender body was taut and wary, and Dame Estelle had seen enough 'cats to recognize the protectiveness with which his tail wrapped about Harrington's throat.

"I must say, Commander, that I was somewhat surprised by Lord Young's sudden departure," Dame Estelle said, and almost blinked at her visitor's reaction. She'd meant the remark as simple small talk, yet its effect was profound. Harrington didn't actually move a muscle, but she didn't have to. Her eyes said it all, narrowing with a hard intensity that was almost frightening, and the treecat was far less restrained. He didn't—quite—hiss, but his flattened ears and half-bared fangs made his position clear, and Dame Estelle wondered what she'd said.

Then Harrington gave herself tiny shake. A hand reached up to gentle the 'cat, and she nodded courteously to the commissioner.

"I was a bit surprised myself, Commissioner." Her soprano was cool and uninflected, a deliberate dispassion that set Dame Estelle's mental antennae on edge. "I understand, however, that his refit requirements had become more urgent than anyone in Manticore realized when my own ship was dispatched here."

"I'm sure." Dame Estelle couldn't quite keep the sour amusement out of her own voice, and Harrington cocked her head slightly. Then she relaxed just a bit, and some of the treecat's tension eased, as well. So. It hadn't been so much what Dame Estelle had said as who she'd said it about. Well, anyone who disliked Pavel Young couldn't be all bad.

"In the meantime, I'll have Ensign Tremaine make some orbital passes looking for power sources outside the enclaves." She grinned suddenly. "I wouldn't want him getting bored now that he and his people have the smugglers cut down to size, now would I?"

"You're a terrible person, Commander Harrington," Dame Estelle said with an answering grin.

"Dame Estelle, you have no idea how terrible," Honor agreed cheerfully. Then she sobered a bit. "It's not much, but it's the best I can offer. If you think of any other way we can help you out, please let me know and I'll do what I can." "Thank you," the commissioner said gratefully. "And it's a nice change to—" She broke off with a shrug and a faint smile, and Honor nodded once again.

roseandheather wrote:Slander and lies. *innocent whistle*

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

"Wake up, Ma'am!"

The hand on Abigail's shoulder felt as if it were the size of a small shovel. It felt as strong as one, too, although it was obviously restraining itself, since it was only ripping one shoulder off at a time.

She sat up abruptly, eyes snapping open. The sleeping bag was like an entrapping cocoon, for all its warmth, and she squirmed, fighting her way out of it even as her brain spun up to speed.

"Yes? I'm awake, Sergeant!" she said sharply.

"We've got trouble, Ma'am," Gutierrez told her in a low voice, almost as if he were afraid of being overheard. "Overflight four or five minutes ago. Then whoever it was came back again, lower. They must have gotten a sniff of something."

"I see." Abigail sucked in a deep lungful of icy mountain air. "Should we move, or sit tight?" she asked the platoon sergeant, deferring to his expertise, and heard him scratching his chin in the darkness.

"Six of one, half a dozen of the other, at the moment, Ma'am," he replied after a moment. "We know they must have picked up something, or they wouldn't have come back. But there's no way to know what they picked up. For that matter, they could've come back around and missed us the second time, in which case they may decide that this is a clear area. In that case, it would be the safest spot we could find. And there's always the fact that people moving around are easier to spot than people bellied down in a good hide. I'd stay here, unless—"

Gutierrez never completed the sentence. The whine of air-breathing turbines seemed to come out of nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, filling the night with thunder. Abigail threw herself flat in instinctive reaction, but her eyes whipped around, seeking the threat source.

She caught a brief, nightmare image of a vast, black shape, looming out of the night like some huge, high-tech bird of prey. It wasn't a pinnace, she realized. It was an assault shuttle, the heavily armed, heavily armored kind that could carry an entire company of battle-armored infantry.

Then something flashed in the night.



"There!" Dangpiam shouted, pointing at the visual imagery as the low-light cameras swept the craggy mountain terrain. Sandoval darted a look at the display herself, but she couldn't afford to take her attention off the flight instruments this close to the ground. Not in terrain like this.

"I'll take your word for it," she said as she brought the big shuttle back around for a third pass. "Punch up the com. Tell Predator we've got them, and then tell Merriwell we're about to drop his people on top of the Manties. I'll stand by for support after that, and th—"

Lightning flashed somewhere beneath her and interrupted her in mid-word.



A Royal Manticoran Marine Corps rifle squad consisted of thirteen men or women divided into two fire teams and commanded by a sergeant. Each fire team consisted of a single plasma rifle, the standard heavy firepower of the Marines, covered by three pulser-armed riflemen and one grenadier, and was commanded by a corporal.

Platoon Sergeant Mateo Gutierrez had deployed his two squads to cover the narrow valley in which they'd found refuge, and his instructions had been explicit. No one was to fire without direct orders from Abigail or him, unless it was obvious that they'd been discovered. But if it was obvious, then he expected his people to use their own initiative.

Which was why four plasma rifles fired virtually simultaneously as Serena Sandoval, who'd forgotten that this time she was hunting Royal Manticoran Marines and not terrified, unarmed civilian spacers, swept back over them for the third time.

The assault shuttle was big, powerful, and well armored for an atmosphere-capable craft. But it wasn't well enough armored to survive simultaneous multiple plasma strikes at a range of less than three hundred meters. The incandescent energy ripped straight through its hull, and Abigail tried to burrow her way into the stony ground as Sandoval, Dangpiam, their flight engineer, and the seventy-five armed pirates who'd thought they were hunting mice, vanished in the brilliant blue flare of igniting hydrogen.

"Good evening, Commander Watson." A blond haired, bearded Manticoran officer replaced Montella on his display. The Manty wore a commodore's insignia, and his blue eyes were remarkably cold. "I am Sir Aivars Terekhov, Royal Manticoran Navy."
Every Solarian officer in the Madras Sector knew that name, and Watson felt a solid lump of ice materialize in the pit of his stomach as he recognized it and remembered a star system named Monica.
We are so fucked, that same little voice whispered.
"Commodore," he replied out loud, fighting to sound normal... and knowing he'd failed. "May I ask what brings you to Mobius, Sir?"
"Yes, you may." Terekhov smiled thinly, and his voice was cold. "We're here in response to an urgent request for humanitarian assistance."
"Humanitarian assistance?" Watson heard the faint, sickly edge in his own voice as he repeated the words.
"I think that's a suitable way to describe it," Terekhov said. "Certainly in light of the 'news broadcasts' we've been monitoring for the past couple of hours."
Sweat beaded Watson's hairline, but this time he said nothing. There was nothing he could say, really.
"Let me put this as clearly as I can, Commander," Terekhov continued after a moment. "I intend to put a stop to the butchery the Solarian League has been actively abetting in this star system. I intend to put a stop to it now, and I intend to take whatever steps are necessary to accomplish that objective. Which brings me to you."
"In... what way?" Watson asked, cursing the slight catch in his voice.
"As I see it, you're part of the problem," Terekhov told him flatly. "You escorted the intervention battalions currently operating on Mobius Beta from the Madras Sector, and you've been supporting them since your arrival." Those icy blue eyes turned even colder. "We've already recorded the evidence of kinetic strikes, Commander Watson, so let's not waste anyone's time pretending you don't know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm willing to assume- for the moment, at least- that you're not the senior officer of this abortion of an operation. As such, I presume you were following someones else's orders, which gives you at least some legal cover. As one serving officer to another, however, we both know exactly what you should have said when given that order, don't we? So I'm afraid the technicalities of your chain of command don't buy you a whole lot with me."
Something shriveled inside Tremont Watson- in shame, this time, not in fear- but Terekhov gave him no opportunity to defend himself.
"You have two options, Commander, but only one chance to pick between them," the Manticoran said. "You can choose to take to your escape pods and small craft and scuttle your ships. Or you can choose not to, in which case I will blow them, and you, and every other man and woman aboard them, straight to hell from a range at which you won't even be able to scratch my paint. As a general rule, I don't much like butchering people who can't fight back. Given what's been happening on this planet, I'm willing to make an exception."
Those ice-blue eyes bored into Tremont Watson's soul.
"You have ten minutes to decide whether or not I do. Terekhov, clear."

So your major requirement from me will be to assist in managing the comings and goings between the enclaves and orbital traffic?"

"I'd say that was pretty much correct," Dame Estelle agreed. "I'd like to be able to call on your Marine complement in the case of any emergency down here, but, as I say, we seem to be pretty well covered so far. If you could take over the inspection of ship-to-surface shuttles and general traffic control, it would free up a lot of my NPA personnel."

"You mean Young didn't even—?" Honor shut her mouth with a click before she said something even more revealing, and the commissioner coughed into her hand to hide a laugh.

Invictus wrote:From Shadow of Freedom

"Good evening, Commander Watson." A blond haired, bearded Manticoran officer replaced Montella on his display. The Manty wore a commodore's insignia, and his blue eyes were remarkably cold. "I am Sir Aivars Terekhov, Royal Manticoran Navy."
Every Solarian officer in the Madras Sector knew that name, and Watson felt a solid lump of ice materialize in the pit of his stomach as he recognized it and remembered a star system named Monica.
We are so fucked, that same little voice whispered.
"Commodore," he replied out loud, fighting to sound normal... and knowing he'd failed. "May I ask what brings you to Mobius, Sir?"
"Yes, you may." Terekhov smiled thinly, and his voice was cold. "We're here in response to an urgent request for humanitarian assistance."
"Humanitarian assistance?" Watson heard the faint, sickly edge in his own voice as he repeated the words.
"I think that's a suitable way to describe it," Terekhov said. "Certainly in light of the 'news broadcasts' we've been monitoring for the past couple of hours."
Sweat beaded Watson's hairline, but this time he said nothing. There was nothing he could say, really.
"Let me put this as clearly as I can, Commander," Terekhov continued after a moment. "I intend to put a stop to the butchery the Solarian League has been actively abetting in this star system. I intend to put a stop to it now, and I intend to take whatever steps are necessary to accomplish that objective. Which brings me to you."
"In... what way?" Watson asked, cursing the slight catch in his voice.
"As I see it, you're part of the problem," Terekhov told him flatly. "You escorted the intervention battalions currently operating on Mobius Beta from the Madras Sector, and you've been supporting them since your arrival." Those icy blue eyes turned even colder. "We've already recorded the evidence of kinetic strikes, Commander Watson, so let's not waste anyone's time pretending you don't know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm willing to assume- for the moment, at least- that you're not the senior officer of this abortion of an operation. As such, I presume you were following someones else's orders, which gives you at least some legal cover. As one serving officer to another, however, we both know exactly what you should have said when given that order, don't we? So I'm afraid the technicalities of your chain of command don't buy you a whole lot with me."
Something shriveled inside Tremont Watson- in shame, this time, not in fear- but Terekhov gave him no opportunity to defend himself.
"You have two options, Commander, but only one chance to pick between them," the Manticoran said. "You can choose to take to your escape pods and small craft and scuttle your ships. Or you can choose not to, in which case I will blow them, and you, and every other man and woman aboard them, straight to hell from a range at which you won't even be able to scratch my paint. As a general rule, I don't much like butchering people who can't fight back. Given what's been happening on this planet, I'm willing to make an exception."
Those ice-blue eyes bored into Tremont Watson's soul.
"You have ten minutes to decide whether or not I do. Terekhov, clear."

I really like Terekhov's character. The Mad Wizard did well with him.

BTW, how do you embed a hyperlink into text on here? I was trying in my last post but couldn't figure it out.
Cheers

So your major requirement from me will be to assist in managing the comings and goings between the enclaves and orbital traffic?"

"I'd say that was pretty much correct," Dame Estelle agreed. "I'd like to be able to call on your Marine complement in the case of any emergency down here, but, as I say, we seem to be pretty well covered so far. If you could take over the inspection of ship-to-surface shuttles and general traffic control, it would free up a lot of my NPA personnel."

"You mean Young didn't even—?" Honor shut her mouth with a click before she said something even more revealing, and the commissioner coughed into her hand to hide a laugh.