"Surely the point is moot now, Counselor. It didn't come to that."
"Yes, we were saved by the Lynx," he said. "But we wish you to understand our motives. We are not your enemy."
"We?"
He nodded. "I did not make the decision alone."
Nara blinked. He had discussed the Emperor's plan with outsiders? The man was admitting treason.
"But how?" she said. "We had only minutes to decide." She looked at the bulky biosuit, wondering if it might house an entangled quantum grid, the only form of communication that could possibly be undetectable to the sensors of the Diamond Palace.
The plagueman spread his thickly gloved hands, a clumsy puppet's gesture, pleading for understanding.
"I have not broken the hundred-year rule, Senator Oxham. The Emperor himself came to the Axis before the question was raised in council. Before the rule was invoked."
Nara nodded and sighed. The sovereign and his tricks. He had gone into the vote with a stacked deck.
"What did he offer you?" she said coldly.
The plagueman turned half away, his puppet hands up in the air now.
"You must understand something, Senator. The Plague Axis of the Risen Empire faces hard times. Bleak centuries ahead." "What do you mean?"
"We are too few," he said. "Although we add diversity to the Empire, we lack enough divergence in our own population. Over the generations, we risk becoming a monoculture ourselves."
Nara frowned, trying to remember the reading she'd done on the Axis since first meeting the members of the council. This hasty study blurred with the volumes of military and megaeconomic theory she had consumed, the forced marches of sudden expertise required to prosecute a war.
"A monoculture?" she asked. "Don't you interbreed with the plague axes of the other coreward powers?" That was the true source of the Axis's independence from the rest of the Empire. They were not simply a reservoir, they were a trading guild.
He ponderously shook his head. "Not for eighty years Absolute. Since the end of the First Incursion, we have been under a blockade."
"A blockade?"
"The Rix have applied pressure throughout the core. The Tungai, the Fahstuns, not even the Laxu will trade with us."
Nara swallowed. Even segments of humanity that were in violent conflict still kept up the exchange of genes through their nominally neutral plague axes. The biological legacy of Earth Prime was so thinly spread, the distances of the diaspora so great, it was playing a dangerous game to reduce diversity any further, like poisoning wells in a desert war.
"Why would they do that?"
"The Rix have a voice everywhere, Nara Oxham. As you know, we are the last coreward power to resist their compound minds. We have been under blockade these last eighty years."
"Why has this been kept secret?"
"The Emperor wished it to be thought that the First Incursion ended in a true peace."
The biosuit's helmet barely moved, but Nara could tell he was shaking his head. She sighed. The Emperor had proclaimed a false victory eighty years ago. The Rix had not been beaten, they had merely moved the conflict into other theaters.
"We are growing weaker," the Plague counselor said. "Less able to stabilize the Empire's billions."
Oxham knew enough to understand the threat. Almost the entire population of the Eighty Worlds had descended from a small portion of one continent on Earth Prime. The weaknesses of monoculture were a constant threat: New contagions and panics propagated quickly, and charismatic figures like the Emperor consolidated power with the hyperbolic curve of pandemics. The consequences of a genetic blockade might one day be even more damaging than this second war with the Rix.
"But why help the Emperor commit mass murder?" she asked. "How could depopulating Legis XV fulfil your aims?"
"Before the War Council took up the issue of destroying the Legis infostructure, the Apparatus came to us with an analysis. How might a war with the Rix increase the diversity of the Empire? In deep history, wars often had such an effect. Mass movements of people brought distant gene pools together, invaders and colonists crossbred with local populations."
"But the Rix don't want to occupy us, Counselor," she said. "There'll be no miscegenation with them, no rape camps or comfort conscripts. Just death, and the sterile occupation of compound minds. A nonbiological violation."
"Correct. The only population movement will be among the Eighty Worlds themselves. Such disruptions are always useful, but they would merely stir the existing pool."
"What was it then?" she asked.
He made a sound that might have been a sigh, which came from the filter in a hiss of white noise, like boiling water poured slowly onto cold metal.
"What the Empire needs is new genes, Senator. New arrangements of DNA. With the Rix blockade, we cannot import them. Only mutation will generate more diversity."
"Hopeful monsters?" she asked. "It's been tried. The laboratory can't create at the same magnitude of evolution. There are never enough subjects, and we don't even know what we're looking for."
The plagueman sighed again. "Not in the laboratory, Senator. But in vivo, in the wild, on a planetary scale."
She blinked, wondering if he could be serious. "Legis?"
He nodded, a slow and clumsy gesture. She shook her head. The man was insane. "But the nuclear weapons over Legis were to be low-yield, clean EMP devices."
"No, Senator. They would have been dirty bombs. An unexplained error."
Nara swayed for a moment, closing her eyes. She needed to sit down. Reaching behind her, she felt the cold and reassuring solidity of the apartment's glassene wall.
"A hundred million wasn't enough for him?"
"There are trillions to think of, Nara Oxham."
"You're mad," she said. "You and he are both insane." Nara walked away from the suited man, barely able to hold what might have happened in her mind. "God above. We would have been complicit in a billion deaths. The Emperor could have held it over the political parties for centuries. Whether we personally voted for it or not, we legitimized the decision by sitting on his council."
"And you could hold it over the sovereign, knowing that the dirty bombings were intentional. The ultimate stabilizing force: mutually assured destruction."