Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

– One of the many turns of phrase which lead me to suspect that she had something of a crush on Cain, despite the personal antipathy he felt towards her – something of which she apparently remained blissfully unaware throughout his period of service with the 597th.

– The third paragraph in succession commencing with this phrase: for Throne’s sake, did she ever bother to read back what she’d written?

– And the consummate intimidatory skills of Amberley Vail, although there was no reason for Sulla to know that, of course.

– And an inquisitor threatening to turn her over to the interrogators as a potential enabler of a Chaos cult – always a handy piece of leverage to have.

– Actually Proktor’s, in her name, and Pelton’s, in mine.

– He made some kind of speech at the official handover, which I was too busy to listen to, and which seemed to have worked; he was always good at that sort of thing.

– XX101DD.

– Actually, it’s pretty hard to take a farseer by surprise, but I didn’t see any reason to mention that; he’d only have fretted.

– I assume he means politically and economically, since diving headlong into the heart of a star seldom ends well for anyone.

– An issue on which opinion actually continues to be divided. Though many armchair analysts concur with Thromp’s assessment – that concentrating on the escorts and transport vessels weakened the fleet as a whole and blunted the thrust of their invasion plans – others are equally adamant that concentrating on the larger vessels would have removed, or at least mitigated, a more powerful threat to the system as a whole. The only ones who truly know, of course, are the eldar farseers, and they aren’t telling.

– The heaviest class of system defence vessel, not to be confused with the Adeptus Astartes war engines of the same name.

– Probably because they found it a refreshing novelty.

– Good guess. According to the records, Fulcher was a little over 112 standard years old at the time of this conversation.

– Not that likely, but it would melt sufficient bedrock for the effect to be pretty much the same to a probably short-lived observer.