Honorverse favorite passages

"Well, if no one's going to worry a lot about the size of our fleet, then maybe the solution to your problem in Silesia is to find you some reinforcements from here. Sending off Grayson ships isn't likely to encourage any sense of adventurism among the Peeps, but their arrival in Silesia might be enough to make Gustav think twice."

"Wait a minute, Benjamin! Given how shaky things are between Grayson and the Star Kingdom right this minute, just how do you think the Alliance's domestic opponents are going to react if you start sending your navy off to pull Manticore's chestnuts out of the fire?"

"Who said anything about the Navy?" Benjamin asked her with a lurking smile.

"You did!"

"No, I mentioned 'Grayson ships.' I don't recall having said a single word about regular naval vessels."

Honor's eyes narrowed, then widened in sudden surmise, and he nodded with a chuckle.

"I'm not going to send a naval detachment to serve under a Manticoran admiral on an RMN naval station, Honor. I'm going to send the Protector's Own on its first major interstellar deployment and training cruise under the direct supervision of its permanent commander, Steadholder Harrington."

"You're out of your mind! Even if that sort of legal fiction was going to do you a bit of good when the Opposition gets hold of this in the Keys, think about the possible consequences. If it does come to a shooting situation with the Andies, then you're going to get Grayson involved in it right alongside the Star Kingdom. And I can tell you that the IAN's always been a much tougher proposition than the Peep Navy ever was!"

"Do you really think that matters?" The brief flash of amusement had faded from Benjamin's eyes, and he shook his head wearily. "Baron High Ridge is an idiot, Honor. You and I both know it, just as we both know he's so obsessed with domestic political maneuvering that he's almost completely oblivious to the potential interstellar disaster we both think he's courting. But the Star Kingdom is still our natural ally, and if the worst happens, Manticore's going to find itself under different management very quickly. If the Star Kingdom goes to war, whether it's with the Andies or the Havenites, we have no realistic choice but to support it, because without the Star Kingdom, Grayson and every other member of the Manticoran Alliance become the natural targets of any aggressor. Which means that I find myself in the unenviable position of being forced to watch High Ridge's and Janacek's backs when they're too stupid to even realize they need watching!"

“I’m not going.” Dusek’s voice was flat, and Thandi felt one eyebrow quirk. “Maybe it is time to start getting some of our people out, but I’m not going to be one of them.”
“This isn’t the best time to start turning all noble,” Victor said mildly.
“Fuck noble,” Dusek replied even more flatly. “I’m not going.”
Thandi started to argue, then stopped herself and glanced at Victor and shook her head ever so slightly, instead. He regarded her quizzically for a moment, then gave a patented, minimal Victor shrug.
“Have it your own way,” he said, and Dusek grunted in obvious satisfaction.
Thandi was positive the gangster would never put it into words, but she knew exactly what was going through his head. Before she’d met him—and before he’d allied himself with her and Victor—she might not have believed it was possible. Now she knew better, and she felt a deep and abiding sense of warmth as she looked at him.
Victor had been right from the beginning; Dusek always had been more than “just” a gangster, whether he would ever have admitted it or not. But he’d still been mostly a gangster, and now he’d become something else. The crime lord was still in there, and not very far from the surface, yet it wasn’t the crime lord who’d announced that he wasn’t leaving Neue Rostock. No, the Jurgen Dusek who’d announced that had made the transition from gangster to patriot.
She glanced at Chuanli and saw the same hardness in his eyes. Both of them knew the equation on Mesa had been changed forever, whether or not the Grand Alliance ever responded to their desperate call for help. The seccies would never again simply lie down and die for the Office of Public Safety. They’d seen where that led…and they’d discovered that they could fight back. That they could hurt their oppressors, punish them in return…even defeat them. What had happened to the Security Directorate in Hancock, what was happening even now to the Peaceforce in Neue Rostock, proved that, and all of the Culture and Information propaganda in the universe couldn’t hide that truth.
More than that, Neue Rostock’s stand had already bought time for other seccy communities to begin organizing, begin stockpiling weapons and preparing their own defenses. The forces Mesa had been forced to commit to reducing Neue Rostock alone had prevented the Office of Public Safety from breaking up those defenses, and the longer Neue Rostock continued to stand, the higher the blood price the Safeties and Misties would pay if they attempted to break them up afterward. None of the other seccy communities by themselves could hope to stand off the massed might of OPS and the Peaceforce, but neither could` the security establishment possibly hope to suppress all of them. The only way they could do that would be to call in the KEWs from the very beginning…and the seccy communities were inside their own cities. To rain kinetic weapons on them would be to devastate their own communities, their own infrastructure…their own families.
My God, she thought. Victor was right again—probably more right than even he realized. We’ve started a genuine revolution, and if the seccies go up in flames, the slaves aren’t going to be far behind.
She remembered the comment Victor had made about providing Torch with the equivalent of its own Alamo if they all died here in Neue Rostock. Jurgen Dusek had probably never thought in terms of a glorious last stand in his entire life, but now he’d grasped the reality—the larger-than-life reality, but still reality—that draped itself around those sorts of stands. The reality of Thermopylae and Masada, of Fort Saint Elmo and Khartoum. Of the Alamo, Verdun, and Stalingrad. Of the Battle of Carson and the Second Battle of Yeltsin and a thousand other places where men and women had stood their ground. Stood to die. “They shall not pass!” All too often the defenders who’d shouted that warcry had failed. They’d fallen, and the enemy had marched forward across their bodies. But for every Thermopylae there was a Battle of Salamis, and for every Alamo there was a Battle of San Jacinto. For every Stalingrad there was a Battle of Kursk…and ultimately, there was a Battle of Berlin, as well.
That was what Jürgen Dusek and Triêu Chuanli had decided to give the seccies of Mesa—give their people, with an awareness that they were their people—their own Leonidas, their own Travis…their own Spartacus. And if they died in the giving, so be it.
“I think we should at least start evacuating the wounded,” she said.

Used up quite a few missiles there, didn’t you, Captain Kaplan?” Jacob Zavala inquired testily. “They don’t grow on trees, y’know! Especially not now.”

“No, Sir, they don’t,” Naomi Kaplan acknowledged with a mildness which would have raised warning flags with anyone who knew her well. “On the other hand, we did take out every one of the freighters without ever entering the escorts’ reach.”

“True, but you could’ve saved at least twenty percent of your ammo expenditure if you’d closed another five or six million kilometers, and that still would’ve left you outside even Javelin range,” Zavala pointed out.

“Yes, Sir, it would have.” Kaplan nodded. “On the other hand,” she continued in the same mild tone, “it probably wouldn’t have left me outside the range of the missiles you actually gave the Sollies for the exercise.”

“What’s that?” Zavala cocked his head, blue eyes narrowed as he gazed quizzically at Kaplan. “Are you suggesting I’d cheat, Captain?”

“To quote one of my tac instructors at the Crusher, Sir, if you aren’t cheating, you’re not trying hard enough.” Kaplan shrugged. “Just as a matter of curiosity, how much of a range boost did you assign?”

“You, Captain Kaplan, have a disrespectful and insulting opinion of my fair-mindedness,” Zavala said severely, then snorted. “As a matter of fact, they had a nominal effective range of twelve million kilometers. A twenty-five percent jump seemed about right.”

“Really?” Kaplan smiled. “I figured you’d settle for a nice round number and just double it, Sir.”

“Now that, Captain, would have been underhanded, unfair, sneaky, and generally despicable. Which is why I’ll probably do exactly that to Captain Morgan’s division when it’s his turn in the barrel.” Zavala waggled a finger in Kaplan’s direction. “And don’t you go warning him, either!”

“Me? Warn him about it?” Kaplan laughed. “Oh, don’t worry about that, Sir. As a matter of fact, I’ve already bet him a bottle of Glenfiddich Grand Reserve that he can’t match our score on the sim. I’ve known Captain Morgan for a while, you know. And somehow I seem to’ve forgotten to mention to him the range at which we engaged the convoy. I hate to say it,” she assumed a mournful expression, “but under the circumstances, I strongly suspect he’s going to decide that if he closes to just outside Javelin range, he’ll be able to punch out all of the merchies with a lot less missiles than we expended.”
She shook her head sadly, and Zavala laughed.

“A woman after my own underhanded, unfair, sneaky, and generally despicable heart,” he observed. “I definitely see an admiral’s flag in your future, Captain Kaplan!”

“It may be that this Manticoran butcher is a big enough lunatic to attack civilians under the Office of Frontier Security’s protection,” he said coldly. “The Solarian League’s made its position on this sort of action very plain, however, Lieutenant Governor Tiilikainen. We do not bargain with, and we do not make concessions to, neobarbs who threaten or even commit acts of terroristic violence against us or against the civilians we’re charged to protect.

“Maybe I won’t be able to stop him,” Dueñas said, settling back in the comfortable chair behind his huge desk and squaring his shoulders resolutely. “But unlike some people, I’m going to do my job. If he chooses to push this still further, then any additional consequences will be his responsibility, not anyone else’s! I’ll go far enough to agree to ask for instructions from higher authority, but that’s as far as I’ll bend. Anything else would be a violation of standing policy, as well as an act of abject cowardice.”

Just sit on that, Jacob, he told himself harshly. Yes, he fucked up and got a lot of people killed, but so did you. You didn’t have to sequence those launches that closely together. You could’ve put a couple of minutes between the first one and the second one—given Dubroskaya more time to react. But you didn’t, did you?

No, he hadn’t, and he doubted anyone would ever fault him for it…except himself. Any board of inquiry would consider his actions and decisions fully justified by the disparity between his squadron’s ability to absorb punishment and its adversary’s potential firepower. And the accuracy of his own fire—and the sheer destructiveness of the Mod G laser heads—had taken him by surprise. He’d anticipated that it would take at least two salvos to completely cripple or destroy one of his adversaries. That was why he’d targeted one salvo on each battlecruiser, expecting to hammer it with enough damage even a Solly had to take note of it and consider that it might be wise to surrender quickly. He’d certainly never expected to blow up battlecruisers with a single launch each!

All of that was true, but he’d still had time. Perhaps he hadn’t had the ammunition to justify going for Fire Plan Zephyr and simply wasting an entire double broadside that didn’t inflict any damage at all. But he could have stretched Sledgehammer out, launched the first salvo with exactly the same targeting but waited a full minute, or even two, before launching the follow on salvos. If he’d done that, that first launch would have turned into a far more emphatic sort of Zephyr and given Dubroskaya one last chance to recognize the truth…and the time to save more of her people’s lives.

LaFollet glared at the closed panel for a long, fulminating moment. Then he drew a deep breath, nodded to himself, and activated his com.

"Simon?"

"Yes, Sir?" Corporal Mattingly's voice came back instantly, and the major grimaced.

"There are some . . . people with signs at the East Gate," he said.

"Are there, Sir?" Mattingly said slowly.

"Indeed there are. Of course, the Steadholder says we can't touch them, so . . ." LaFollet let his voice trail off, and he could almost see the corporal nod in comprehension of what he hadn't said.

"I understand, Sir. I'll warn all the boys to leave them alone before I go off duty."

"Good idea, Simon. We wouldn't want them involved if anything untoward were to happen. Ah, by the way, perhaps you should let me know where to find you if I need you before you're due to report back."

"Of course, Sir. I thought I'd go see how the Sky Domes' construction crews are coming. They're finishing up this week, and you know how much I love watching them work. Besides, they're all devoted to the Steadholder, so I try to sort of keep them up to date on how things are going for her."

"That's very kind of you, Simon. I'm sure they appreciate it," LaFollet said, and broke the connection. He leaned back against the wall, guarding his Steadholder's privacy, and his thin smile was hard.

"Well?" she said to Miranda, and her maid gave her an equally intense scrutiny, then nodded.

"You look lovely, My Lady," she said, and Honor chuckled.

"I'll take that in the spirit it was intended, but you really shouldn't fib to your Steadholder, Miranda."

"Of course not, My Lady. That's why I don't." Miranda's gray eyes, so like her brother's, gleamed with mischief, and Honor shook her head.

cthia wrote:
Sometimes, the proof is in the pudding. How could Haven have survived for four years without rolling out anything new?

Roguevictory wrote:

cthia wrote:
Sometimes, the proof is in the pudding. How could Haven have survived for four years without rolling out anything new?

Easy. Their main conflict in that period was a civil war which means their enemies had the same hardware but the hostile commanders were somewhere between the average SLN Battle Fleet flag officer and Young or Santino in skill.

Though it was an act of supreme lunacy to be convinced that they hadn't come up with anything new in that time.