There's that epilogue in Nemesis Games where the Martian ship gets eaten by the evil aliens, but the first event before alien dinner time is Sauveterre taking a bracelet from a subordinate and explaining to her in great detail why wearing a bracelet with your uniform leads to anarchy, and so he's actually being kind by taking her mother's bracelet and throwing it in the trash instead of ordering her execution then and there. I don't have the book at hand but he goes on about how he can see her realise (that you're a lunatic, sir, though probably not what you meant), and it's honestly a bit of a relief that he gets eaten, even if the evil aliens are scary.
Flash forward thirty years and a book to Persepolis Rising where in the prologue Cortazar goes to check his "milking herd" for protomolecule samples (people who have been sacrificed, those are people, Cortazar), and has a casual chat with a coworker about how one of their guards is now being slowly killed by the protomolecule because maybe he slept on the job or something (they don't know what he did, and they don't care). Drives home that poor Babbage likely would have been thrown in the protomolecule pit for a bracelet, had they already arrived at Laconia. These people don't mess around and they're also really really not the sort of people you'd want heading a galaxy spanning empire, holy moly
