For the avoidance of doubt since we didn't mention it in this episode as much:

Praise Jurgen

"My Faith is my shield"
"My shield is stolen carapace armour."

Honestly the munitorum managing to send two regiments to a planet with desired specialisation is a miracle of Emperor, but I guess that's Cain's life.

Maybe the true traitors were the friends we made along the way.

Hope Kari's treatment is going well 💖

The thing I love about this book so much is actually the insight into the chaos forces. It adds so much depth to them when you think about it. The World Eaters are revealed to send out groups of marines to cultivate and guide Khornate cultist warhosts. Plus the way they fight is still very strategic, I feel like too much people reduce Khorne to mindless berserkers, they send down Khorne Berserker strike teams to key locations throughout the novel. And when they realise that the Slaaneshi cult is close to getting demons on the field, something they know they can't really beat easily, they do a reckless teleport of Berserkers (it's mentioned that it's likely a decent amount of Berserkers got teleported into the ocean or metal and died) to try and stop the ritual before it completes. And they would have likely been successful if the Slaaneshi cultists weren't literally throwing themselves with bombs at the Chaos Marines.

The whole fight for the planet is such an interesting 1 vs 1 vs 1 where each side is trying to get ahead of the other and can't afford to focus on just one enemy.

Also I don't think the Marines go down too easily, the first one killed is killed by what is effectively an anti-tank weapon (JURGEN MOMENT) and the rest as I said above are whittled down by suicidal cultists with explosives and similarly damaging weapons.

The Slaaneshi infiltration is also interesting but the Khornate stuff I think is the best.

Imperial gaurd children will typically be sent to their homeworld, a nearby Imperial Schola which includes military schooling, or be brought into the regiment and given one of numerous minor roles like carrying ammo depending on how fucked a regiment's deployment is.

Dresden files mentioned

Also "Interesting Places and Tedious People: A Wanderers' Waybook" by Joval Sicara is my favorite piece of in-universe literature for 40k

It is cute that in the real world character accomplishments grow in each retelling, and Cain is an example of this happening in universe. Fun meta commentary, or fun coincidence?

Didn't get youtube sending me the last one so I click onto this one and get shocked by the Caves of Ice slander - that's one of the Cain books I have the strongest memories of. Don't skip that, it's not only got a tight, intimate take on the standard Cain book formula that sets the template for pretty much every necron and admech novel in the decades since, but it does a ton of character work on the Valhallan cast that follows him in the majority of his books.

In all honestly, the absolute safest place would probably be in a car alongside Jurgen. In one of the books, it's mentioned that Jurgen managed to drive his Chimera at full throttle into an opening which was barely even bigger than the Chimera itself without even grazing the walls, but the drivers behind him all managed to scrape and destroy some of the wall as they plowed through. Or when Jurgen got an order from Cain "Get us off this landing pad an onto that transport". Which Jurgen gladly did, by making them both fly through the air as they landed in the cargo bay, think it was a Salamander.
He's the kind of guy who can Tokyo drift a tank into a parallel parking space flawlessly.

Honestly I don’t get why the Ork omnibus would have Caves of Ice. Death or Glory, (the 4th book,) features the Orks in a much better capacity than Caves does and works better as a standalone/starting point for people who have not read a Ciaphas Cain book before.

Traitors Hand is up there for one of the best Cain novels. I still reread quite often, so many great moments

20:10 my personal interpretation of the situation is that the female trooper in question would be marked down as “wounded” and sent back home with the rest of the combat ineffective casualties. Then once she “recovers” she could be returned to service in the next batch of replacements. Basically all she’d need to do is walk up to the recruiting desk and say that she’s an old veteran of the 597th and request to be sent back with the next batch of boot camp graduates. Alternatively, she might not even have that obligation. She might just be allowed to go home and raise her kid. The imperium of man isn’t as cruel or unreasonable as it’s made out to be in the books. Which usually takes place in the worst of locations in the most sub optimal circumstances. Most worlds in the imperium are kinda just… normal. Like living on earth right now for many. I think people latch onto the 0.001% of the imperium they see in the books and don’t think to comprehend the 99.999% of worlds that never get a mention.

Read "Death or Glory" next, is my favorite

Orkz are so much fun and even more with cain shenanigans mixed in

11:51 We can thank Peter Turbo for messing up their planet and turning it into a desert world and thus giving us one of the funniest moments in 40K ever

Fun Fact Sulla’s VA in audible is the same VA for minthara the drow paladin from BG3

Cain's interactions with Slaanesh cultists are actually foreshadowed in For The Emperor, when he mentions his near seduction by a Slaanesh Cultist, in the same chapter he first meets Amberly. I like to think that was Emily, since the first three books form a trilogy of sorts.

How the hell did I miss this one

Even on this channel Possom's ear being ravaged by the mention of the forbidden UN-ORKY ORKY book.

I agree with ava about twice dead king