The Sound of Rebellion

With the latest episode of John Scalzi's The Human Division, The Sound of Rebellion, we learn how many places there are in an average city where a person might wake up strapped to a chair and why even genetically engineered super-soldiers need to be careful about someone slipping them a mickey.

After a night of heavy partying Lieutenant Heather Lee, last seen commanding her platoon back in We Only Need the Heads, wakes up to find herself in a bad position: naked, blindfold, strapped to a chair, and being interrogated by a disembodied voice. Not trusting her interrogator's assertion that they don't plan to use violence as long as she tells them the absolute truth, Lt Lee sets about thinking her way out of her situation.

The Sound of Rebellion features a clever puzzle plot — how to escape when you're naked and trussed up like a turkey — that provides a nice callback to some of Jared Dirac's antics. A few more arc details are revealed, principally through Col Egan's debriefing, that suggest that the internal rot within the Colonial Union may be worse than most people suspect. Rather belatedly, I've started to wonder whether Egan might not be on secondment from the Ghost Brigades; but maybe, in this case, a surname really is just a surname...