102
A form of festival entertainment popular on a number of worlds in the Eastern Arm, in which incidents from the lives of the saints or the Emperor are mingled with the crudest kind of knockabout humour. Far from being considered sacrilegious, these are generally regarded with indulgent approval by the Ecclesiarchy, on the grounds that they're bringing the word of the Emperor to the masses, and a few flatulence jokes is a small price to pay for actually being listened to for once.
103
Ironically, despite his ambivalence towards her, Cain still seems to consider Mira more officer than civilian at this point - unless he's deferring to her diplomatic credentials.
104
Ironically, despite his ambivalence towards her, Cain still seems to consider Mira more officer than civilian at this point - unless he's deferring to her diplomatic credentials.
105
Ironically, despite his ambivalence towards her, Cain still seems to consider Mira more officer than civilian at this point - unless he's deferring to her diplomatic credentials.
106
It's hard to be sure from Cain's vague description, but it's possible that these were portable cogitator cores, intended to download the data from the venerable archives aboard the derelict prior to attempting to salvage the system physically. That way, the information would survive, even if the mechanisms themselves proved too fragile to remove intact.
107
Since the Codex Astartes specifies an upper limit of ten men to a Space Marine squad, including Terminators, we can infer that either two smaller squads were present, or a single one had been reinforced by attached specialists of some kind. Since the most likely individual to have been accorded the honour of a personal suit of Terminator armour would have been a Librarian, who would undoubtedly have reacted to Jurgen's presence in a noticeable fashion, we can be reasonably confident that the former alternative was the case; which ties in with Cain's earlier description of a specialised assault squad working in concert with a regular formation of Terminators. If, of course, his habitually vague estimate of their numbers can be relied on.
108
Around a quarter of an hour, according to the official mission logs.
109
Something he may have witnessed for himself during the battle for the floating hives of Kosnar.
110
More likely the engine had been throttled back, allowing the gunship to coast, while the pilot corrected its attitude in preparation for docking.
111
Quite. The probability of the genestealers in the Viridia System having originated somewhere other than the Spawn of Damnation is in the order of 0.35%, according to my savant Mott, who has a considerable aptitude for this kind of statistical analysis. Or any other kind, come to that, which is why he's been barred from innumerable gaming establishments, particularly when accompanied by Cain.
112
They can't tolerate vacuum indefinitely, like some of the void-adapted creatures of the tyranid hive mind, but they can certainly remain conscious and dangerous for considerably longer than an unprotected human would; so even depressurising a section of a ship or void station harbouring them may not be enough to subdue them entirely.
113
In fact they were probably a great deal more ancient than that; according to the surviving records, the Redeemer-class heavy cruiser was first commissioned during the lifetime of the Emperor, and used extensively in the great crusades predating the Horus Heresy. Along with so much else, the secrets of their construction were lost in the course of the centuries following that cataclysmic upheaval, and although they continued to serve with the Imperial Fleet, the inevitable losses were never able to be replaced. The last known example was destroyed by renegades attempting to force passage through the Cadian Gate early in M35.
