Battlecruiser Quotes

Hamish Alexander-Harrington knew his wife as only two humans who had both been adopted by a pair of mated treecats ever could. He'd seen her deal with joy and with sorrow, with happiness and with fury, with fear, and even with despair. Yet in all the years since their very first meeting at Yeltsin's Star, he suddenly realized, he had never actually met the woman the newsies called "the Salamander." It wasn't his fault, a corner of his brain told him, because he'd never been in the right place to meet her. Never at the right time. He'd never had the chance to stand by her side as she took a wounded heavy cruiser on an unflinching deathride into the broadside of the battlecruiser waiting to kill it, sailing to her own death, and her crew's, to protect a planet full of strangers while the rich beauty of Hammerwell's "Salute to Spring" spilled from her ship's com system. He hadn't stood beside her on the dew-soaked grass of the Landing City duelling grounds, with a pistol in her hand and vengeance in her heart as she faced the man who'd bought the murder of her first great love. Just as he hadn't stood on the floor of Steadholders' Hall when she faced a man with thirty times her fencing experience across the razor-edged steel of their swords, with the ghosts of Reverend Julius Hanks, the butchered children of Mueller Steading, and her own murdered steaders at her back. But now, as he looked into the unyielding flint of his wife's beloved, almond eyes, he knew he'd met the Salamander at last. And he recognized her as only another warrior could. Yet he also knew in that moment that for all his own imposing record of victory in battle, he was not and never had been her equal. As a tactician and a strategist, yes. Even as a fleet commander. But not as the very embodiment of devastation. Not as the Salamander. Because for all the compassion and gentleness which were so much a part of her, there was something else inside Honor Alexander-Harrington, as well. Something he himself had never had. She'd told him, once, that her own temper frightened her. That she sometimes thought she could have been a monster under the wrong set of circumstances. And now, as he realized he'd finally met the monster, his heart twisted with sympathy and love, for at last he understood what she'd been trying to tell him. Understood why she'd bound it with the chains of duty, and love, of compassion and honor, of pity, because, in a way, she'd been right. Under the wrong circumstances, she could have been the most terrifying person he had ever met. In fact, at this moment, she was . It was a merciless something, her "monster"—something that went far beyond military talent, or skills, or even courage. Those things, he knew without conceit, he, too, possessed in plenty. But not that deeply personal something at the core of her, as unstoppable as Juggernaut, merciless and colder than space itself, that no sane human being would ever willingly rouse. In that instant her husband knew, with an icy shiver which somehow, perversely, only made him love her even more deeply, that as he gazed into those agate-hard eyes, he looked into the gates of Hell itself. And whatever anyone else might think, he knew now that there was no fire in Hell. There was only the handmaiden of death, and ice, and purpose, and a determination which would not— couldnot—relent or rest. "I'll miss them," she told him again, still with that dreadful softness, "but I won't forget. I'll never forget, and one day— oneday, Hamish—we're going to find the people who did this, you and I. And when we do, the only thing I'll ask of God is that He let them live long enough to know who's killing them.

She [Lady Budd] was dressed in a manner to be described as impregnable, like a long, neat, up-to-date battle-cruiser.

The thought should have comforted Bobby but it didn’t. He found himself thinking of what William Golding had said, that the boys on the island were rescued by the crew of a battle-cruiser and good for them . . . but who would rescue the crew? That was stupid, no one ever looked less in need of rescuing than Rionda Hewson did at that moment, but the words still haunted Bobby. What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses? Christ, that couldn’t be, could it? It was too horrible to think about.

He found himself thinking of what William Golding had said, that the boys on the island were rescued by the crew of a battlecruiser and good for them . . . but who would rescue the crew? ...What if there were no grownups? Suppose the whole idea of grownups was an illusion? What if their money was really just playground marbles, their business deals no more than baseball-card trades, their wars only games of guns in the park? What if they were all still snotty-nosed kids inside their suits and dresses?

as it did. The crest said "PNS Farnese" and that always irritated him. After all, the battlecruiser wasn't a Navy ship; she belonged to State Security, and her designation should reflect that. Except that the Navy's position was that she was only a Navy ship which was assigned to StateSec, as if the true guardians of the People's safety had no right to put on the airs of "real" warriors. Of course, Thornegrave conceded, hanging SSS on the front of a ship's name would probably look a little funny, but it's the principle of the thing! The Navy and the Marines represent vestigial holdovers from the decadent elitism of the Old Regime. It's past time that State Security absorbed them both into a single organization whose loyalty to the People and State can be absolutely relied upon. The people's commissioners are a move in the right direction, but there's still too much room for recidivists to secretly sabotage the war and the Revolution alike. Surely Citizen Secretary Saint-Just and Citizen Chairman Pierre realize that, don't they? No doubt they did, he told himself once more

Supposedly they could do that, Vleen reminded himself with a healthy measure of skepticism. The target ship was controlled by humans who had an Elder AI helping them. He thought it unlikely that ship’s original AI still existed, or that the architecture of the substrate was anything even remotely familiar to the experts who were assigned to hack into it. The idea that they could take back the battlecruiser simply by accessing its main computer was almost silly, yet those were his orders.

With the benefit of hindsight it is arguable that the Royal Navy would have had better value from the 15in-gun battlecruisers for which sketch designs were prepared in November 1921, and which were subsequently rejected in favour of the slow, heavily armoured 23-knot battleship.

One of the problems with writing about Room 40, especially as a pioneer for Bletchley Park, is that Hall was operating, not just outside the law, but outside all conventions. He kept his ruses in his head, managed them by force of personality and his own charm, and wrote very little down. In the years after the war, he tried to deflect the real story over and over again by inventing little untruths and obscurities. So we will probably never know, for example, if it was Hall’s fake signal to Admiral Maximilian von Spee’s squadron in the Pacific which lured them so disastrously to the Falklands, where the battlecruisers Invincible and Inflexible lay in wait.

This might be the moment to explain the origin of the idea of ‘battlecruisers’ which were to play such a role in this and the other actions in the North Sea. It was originally Fisher’s idea to launch a new class of warship that was as big, or bigger, than a capital ship – a conventional battleship – but was faster and therefore less well protected. They would be “stronger than anything faster and faster than anything stronger”. Their high point was the successful destruction of Von Spee’s squadron in the South Atlantic. After that, they tended to be used as fast scouting units ahead of the battlefleet, which took them into conflict with other battlecruisers, for which they had not really been designed. The British battlecruisers, sleek, vast and beautiful and under the command of the dashing Sir David Beatty, lay at anchor in the Firth of Forth, so that they could speed south to prevent the bombardment of English seaside towns by units of the German High Seas Fleet.

In fact, it was the German battlecruisers which sent the first signal which alerted Room 40 that something was being planned. It was sent by the commander of their battlecruiser scouting force, Admiral Franz Ritter von Hipper, on the 14th of December. He was asking for air reconnaissance over a sector of the North Sea and revealing that his force would leave the Jade Estuary at 0330. The signal was successfully decoded and, at 7pm, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson – known to the navy as Old ‘Ard ‘Eart, and recalled from retirement to the inner circle at the outbreak of war – asked for an urgent meeting with Fisher and Churchill.

At his instigation, Churchill sent dummy battlecruisers – as well as a real one – to the Dardanelles, hoping that it might tempt Hipper out under the impression that Beatty’s force was below strength. Together with Lt Col Reginald Drake, later head of G Branch at MI5, he faked a series of photos which appeared to show that Beatty’s flagship Lion was taking much longer to repair after the Battle of Dogger Bank than had been expected. In doing so, he successfully lured away the U-boats which had been lying in wait for her first sea trial out of dry dock.

Big Nick,” Lieutenant Marteen Yatarward asked, “you alright? You look a little nervous.” “Of course I look nervous!” the big man exclaimed. “You let Captain Tomeral promote me, and now I’m a stinking officer, and the executive officer of a light battlecruiser. What kind of friend are you?

the battlecruiser HMS Hood, which at 860 feet was the pride of the fleet. While her eight 15-inch guns were the largest then afloat, her Achilles’ heel was her relatively thin armor, which made her more vulnerable than any battleship.

at the commencement of the battle-cruiser action the German Von der Tann had fought an unimpeded ship-to-ship duel with the British Indefatigable. In fourteen minutes’ firing with her eleven-inch guns the Von der Tann had sunk the Indefatigable without receiving a single hit from the Indefatigable’s twelve-inch.

(Britain had 84 battleships and battlecruisers, including 35 modern battleships; compared, respectively, with Germany’s 48 and 20 and the United States’s 41 and 18. France, Japan, Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary trailed.)