Very simple use of multiple HC-05 slaves?

Im looking at 16-18 total devices in a linear net with any one device acting
as a master and the rest as slaves. There is to be no broadcast feedback
from the slaves. Master broadcasts of 2 bytes only would occur no sooner than
every few secs. It's altogether likely that only those slaves close to/adjacent to the
master would be "interested" in the broadcast as their associated Arduinos would
initiate control actions.