as

to stand on

to stand on end at how casually she used the term "megatons."
"We stopped them, but they killed four and a half billion people, most of them civilians. Of course, from the Kanga viewpoint, there's no such thing as 'civilians' or 'noncombatants,' but we were pretty ired."
Her words were light again, but her eyes were not.
"We learned a lot from the Kangas' wreckage. Not as much as we would have liked, but more than they probably expected we could. Unfortunately, the Kangas are logical, and they'd left one ship out where we couldn't get at it. As soon as it saw how things were going, it headed home at max.
"The result back home when it got there was pandemonium—and it must have been even worse because they didn't have any samples of our technology. But they did have a head start, and they'd been working hard at R&D ever since they sent their first fleet out, just in case. They knew none of their FTL transports had been captured intact, so they figured we hadn't gotten any samples of their multi-dee—that's what makes FTL travel possible—but they were only half right. Their long-range missiles used a cruder form of the same principle, and we did get our hands on a couple of them.
"Anyway, they went to crash building rates to