A Beautiful Friendship (Honor Harrington - Star Kingdom Book 1)

by David Weber

willing

"unwilling"

hunters

"solitary hunters"

make

"make sure"

per second

"per second, per second"

impossibly difficult,

The difficult, we do immediately. The impossible, takes a little longer.

politics could always be counted on to make a bad situation worse.

As tall as an Old Earth sequoia

The problem I have with this is that even here on Earth, trees are limited in height by how high they can transport sap. Unless of course these trees can "pump" the sap up.

“If you aim a weapon at someone else, you raise the stakes. Whoever it is has to assume you will—or may, at least—pull the trigger. If she’s willing to back down, well and good. If she’s not, and some people won’t be, she may decide to go for broke, instead. If she’s got a weapon of her own, she’ll use it. If she doesn’t, she’ll try to take your weapon, and if that happens, she’ll probably use it against you. So never think for a moment that simply waving a gun at someone is going to magically make them do whatever it is you want them to do. “But the flip side of that is that you’d better be sure—damned sure—the stakes are worth escalating a confrontation that way. If there’s any question in your mind that stopping the other person justifies killing her, then it doesn’t. Because the truth is that once you shoot someone, you can never put that bullet back into the gun.