Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

– Like many of his calling, his augmented vision wasn’t limited to the visible spectrum.

– Relatively insignificant only in a relative sense; worlds have fallen, or come close to it, wherever the clandestine trade in t’au artefacts across the borders of the two powers has been left unsuppressed. The alarming degree of t’au influence Cain noted among a large proportion of the population on Gravalax, for instance, presumably began in much the same way.

– Not necessarily, but the Officio Assassinorum tends to be a bit sniffy about requests to despatch one of their agents to the heart of a hostile empire unless you can show a pressing reason for it, and have all the forms in triplicate.

– Usually in a muttered undertone, with a nervous glance over the shoulder.

– An orbital landing craft, capable of carrying a full company of Imperial Guard troopers, which should give you some idea of the scale of our surroundings; though Cain gives little indication of it, the hangar was roughly the size of a modest cathedral.

– An unusual choice of phrase, by which I assume he means five or so; normally he’d refer to that number of troopers operating independently as a detachment or a fire team, but probably didn’t consider them sufficiently organised to merit either appellation – particularly in the light of his next remark.

– Around a billion people all told, not counting transients like starship crews and their passengers, distributed across almost a hundred orbital facilities. Not evenly, of course, the most populous being home to some twenty million, and the smallest only a few hundred thousand.

– Or, more accurately, a version of it calculated to place him in the most flattering light possible.

– Fortunately not as often as all that, although his skills were quite literally life-saving on more than one occasion. Our lives, anyway, not so much anyone else’s, particularly if they happened to fly across his gun-sights.

– To be fair, most people wouldn’t have a seizure if they stood too close to him.

– Like weapons, although he would have had no way of knowing that.

– Airlocks large enough to accommodate heavy cargo vessels like the one commandeered by Defroy and his people being more trouble than they’re worth when traffic volumes rise past a certain point.

– Or, to be more accurate, the cargo hauler it was all but clinging to.