NARRATOR: An engineering bay in the Eina-Afa spindle...
CHINOOK: Thank you, Kevyn.
Those three annie plants are wonderful. Eina-Afa has a proper defense network now.
I've warbucked two hundred and thirteen Long Gun Corvettes, and twice as many depot vessels to keep them fed and happy.
I've cleaned up three more of those crusty old Oafan fabbers, and they're spitting out passive sensors with hypernet nodes.
KEVYN: Congratulations on the deployment of your very own "Very Dangerous Array."
CHINOOK: Passive nodes, Kevyn. All they do is call targets for the LGCs.
KEVYN: The "Very Dangerous" name still fits. An attacking fleet would get painted and perforated without being able to return fire.
CHINOOK: Fine. I'll grant "Very Dangerous."
Two hundred and thirteen simultaneous kill shots, fired through pinholes in the fabric of the baryonic plane.
I look at what I've built, and even I wouldn't try to attack me.
KEVYN, off-panel: Where are you parking the fleet of Corvettes?
CHINOOK, off-panel-: Here and there. Mostly "there," though. Ninety-nine-point-lots-of-nines percent of the galaxy is empty blackness, perfect for hiding the nodes of my defense network.
KEVYN, off-panel: Chinook, you can literally shoot anything you can see. Ennesby and LOTA both demonstrated that this is a terrifying offensive weapon.
CHINOOK: Don't worry. If I so much as threaten to use the LGCs offensively, people will take them away from me.
KEVYN: Your argument sounds like "I won't shoot you because I don't want to lose any of my shiny bullets."
CHINOOK: Exactly. People will relax when they see that I want to have the weapons more than I want to use them.