Ciaphas Cain: Choose Your Enemies

– The planetary defence force didn’t issue troopers with personal vox-beads. Instead, a specialist vox-operator, trained in the correct procedures and incantations, would carry a backpack unit to enable the officer in charge to keep in touch with their headquarters and other units in the vicinity. These were typically a good deal more powerful, and Cain mentions several instances in the course of his memoirs when the 597th used similar pieces of kit to extend the range of their vox-beads in the interest of operational efficiency.

– Apart from Jurgen, of course, who was already carrying his ready for use.

– The living organisms shot by tyranid weapons are, for the most part, mercifully short-lived, having been selectively bred (or, perhaps more accurately, constructed) for lifespans measured only in seconds. Probably because that makes them easier to reabsorb into the swarm’s biomass reserves after expenditure, or because leaving them motile and liable to attack anything living in the vicinity would make them as much of a problem to the ’nids as to their enemies.

– A common misapprehension among those who have encountered them, generally at the business end of a firearm, but a reasonable one.

– A rather disquieting aside, given his early life in a place like this.

– Which face-eaters infest on a number of Imperial worlds, though by no means all. From his next remark we can infer that Cain’s original home – wherever that was – had remained free of them, for instance.

– Something Mott explained later, as, at the time, no one was particularly interested in how they knew we were there.

– No mean feat of marksmanship, under the circumstances – which, as usual, he doesn’t seem to regard as in any way remarkable.

– In fact she still had plenty of energy left, but the focusing array in the barrel had been damaged by the face-eater’s digestive juices.

– Not to mention Zemelda’s.

– Or paranoia.

– On the contrary, flexibility of thinking is a vital asset in an inquisitor. Something rather too many of my colleagues fail to take into account.

– Apart from a few further firefights with wandering eldar, and underhivers discovering too late that attempting to murder us for our trappings was a really bad idea.

– One of them, ironically, being Jenit Sulla, especially in the later part of her career, although this seems to have passed Cain by entirely.

– Tech-priests in Inquisitorial service tend to be atypical in many respects.