"Oh let me paint you a picture of home. Of us few hundred left on the Ninth, exactly three of us were below the age of 35. There was me, immaculate of course, Harrowhawk my necromancer who looks mostly like a drowned weasel and liked to stare at me like she was dissecting me in her mind, and Ortus who was lumpy and sad and spent most of his time with his mother hovering over his shoulder. Of the rest, not one of the great-aunts was below the age of sixty-something and most were closer to a hundred, only distinguished from the skeletons tilling the fields by their thick black veils and the skin that might as well have been vacsealed to those bones." A pause, and with remembrance, Gideon adds- "Excitement mostly involved the various faithful having a heart attack in the pews the one time we got a letter from the Emperor."

She gives Erin an grin. "So if you thought I deserves a medal before, then cover my chest with fancy and call me Rear Admiral, for I've been fighting for my life since the very moment I realized how hot women were."