In which one remains in plain sight and vulnerable.

One’s own mother used to say “Sleep tight, and don’t let the bedbugs bite”. Apparently bedbugs are one unpleasantness that isn’t found on Surebleak. (They prefer a tropical climate, I gather.)

Val Con’s comment about the army of Old Tech suggests that it might be Rys’s team behind the misappropriated devices the Commander was worried about. That fits, since the devices were apparently removed by somebody with command authority and part of their plan involved subverting the Department’s chain of command, but I hadn’t thought of them because I assumed that was going to be difficult enough to have been depicted on the page.

I wonder if “they were six, at the start of it” means that there’s going to be more than six later, that they’re going to recruit more people along the way. That’s a more cheerful possibility than the alternative, that it’s going to be counting down from six to zero.