* When she first steps aboard Nemesis, Grace is reminded of a talk she had with Allyria when they were little that gave her nightmares afterwards.
-->'''Allyria:''' What’s the difference between something that’s dead, something that’s sleeping and something that’s waiting?
-->'''Grace:''' What?
-->'''Allyria:''' What happens to ''you''.

* When the crew of the 'Bequeathed' first board 'Nemesis', there's a distinctive thumping sound that echoes through the entire wreck that makes it hard to sleep and that the light flicker in time to. A few chapters later, they find out that it's the ship's railguns' loading mechanisms working to load non existent shells into the dead guns. The ship is ''trying to kill them despite being effectively dead'' from their point of view.

* Nemesis likes to use nanomachines and subsonics to make people hear voices. The effect produced is absolutely terrifying - especially since it first shows up in a man who's encountered her before and had the memory blocked, so it looks like PTSD - then it starts happening to other people.

* Actually, pretty much everything Nemesis does to boarders qualifies. To quote a reader "Any sufficiently advanced psychological warfare is indistinguishable from a hostile paranormal."

* Echo. She's chained, yes, but it isn't enough. Red One describes her as being everything the Compact fears about her, and getting worse every time they try to recreate her, thinking they got it right this time. Now consider that the Compact views Red One as the Devil and Red One sees herself as a necessary monster.
* The Oshantan AI. it went completely right. it did what it was made to do. it made them happy.
** According to the compact/Principality, anyway. there is occasional debate in the thread on what exactly lead to that situation.

* The Naiads. No one who isn't Red One or Echo can even confirm they exist, ships just disappear in the regions where their songs are heard. What Red One and Echo know isn't reassuring at all: The Naiads are some kind of species of living or sentient starship. They HUNT starships and don't seem to consider anyone but themselves to be really alive - they call everyone else 'deadtone'. Red One has a pact with one group, but they really don't understand her or anyone else - the queen of that group thinks blowing up Rally would be a favor.
* A full Naiad 'migration' would be a serious threat to the Compact as a whole. It's not due for a few millennia. Think about that - the Naiads don't care about anyone else, kill for sport, and the galactic superpower is under existential threat from them when they are most active.
* The short story ''The Final Line'' shows the last stand of a civilization called the Ommeret during the ''last'' Naiad migration, about eight thousand years before the events of ''The Last Angel'', proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Naiads would lay waste to the Compact and the Principality.
---> Manthurn looked upon the plotting screen. He swallowed, feeling acid and bile roll down his esophagus to his second stomach. Thousands upon thousands of enemy drive sources speckled the sky, filling it. He remembered the warnings of the alien refugees as they’d passed through the Empire and he suddenly realized the truth of those words… and the horror of them.
--->''There are no stars.''

* The more you read about the Compact's History, the more you realize it started out as a United Federation of Planets-style alliance. the Details of WHAT started its decay qualify, as would its current policies by the standards of its founders.

* There's one line that sums up Nemesis from the perspective of the Compact.
--> "Humanities greatest achievement was its most unforgivable sin"

* The glassing of Earth is of course horrifying in itself, but its told from the perspective of Red Two and Red Three, the uncompleted dreadnoughts ''Hekate'' and ''Athena'', whose every instinct is to fight but can't. In a very real sense it's having someone chained and forced to helplessly watch as their friends and family are murdered in front of them. Even Red One never had to face that horror on that scale.

* The first Names of The Demon side story, Skyfall, stars Nemesis's response to an alien civilization who handled UECNS Gabriel's crashlanding extremely poorly has two lovely bits.
** First, what happened to the survivors of the Gabriel. Their ship is crippled after a successful getaway jump, they're on an impact course with an inhabited planet. They manage to get it under control enough to crash-land on an uninhabited island and not wreck the planet and six of them even survive. They're promptly *stormed* by the locals. Three die trying to fight off the unprovoked attacked, the other three are murdered in custody. And then the crew who were in stasis are *experimented on* for biotech data. They went above and beyond to save people they'd never met and were horribly killed for it.
** Second, Nemesis's response. She shows up and proceeds to take away *everything* the nation who murdered the crew of the Gabriel derived from it. Which means ... essentially all technology they've developed in the last sixty years. Per her usual rules she doesn't blow up civilian tech but she does wipe every last bit of relevant data. Imagine losing *every last bit of technology* you're used to because it turns out that over a half century ago someone did something really unethical thinking no one would ever know and then a being that might as well be a god shows up and is not happy.
* In the third book, TheConspiracy within the Triquetran League. Cyborg people whose bodies can be taken over, memories edited, and thoughts overwritten. The capability is used and abused in almost every way imaginable. Your body can be puppeteered by your commanding officer... or a black, alien *thing* that lives inside you. If you die, a force-grown clone, who *thinks* it is you and that the death was merely a close call, takes your place as if nothing happened. Or you might *chose* to have your brain removed, mutilated, and implanted in an alien spider robot.