"From the Senate floor itself," the Emperor said.
"I must protest, sire," the Utopian senator interjected. "The Senate is in legal session, considering a matter of great importance. The only attack on the Empire is the military's incursion against senatorial privilege."
"No military units have crossed the Pale, Senator," the risen general said. "Then why is the Great Forum surrounded?" the Expansionist demanded.
"For the protection of the Senate," the Emperor nearly shouted.
The plagueman had never seen the sovereign so incensed. He seemed unaffected by whatever had crippled his Apparatus, though he had lost his usual boundless reserve of calm. The biosuit's optics had always revealed the Emperor's physiology to be more animated than an ordinary risen, but now they showed a heat in his face almost as intense as a living man's.
"Protection?" the Expansionist sputtered. "The Senate is surrounded, its contact with the rest of the capital cut off. This is nothing but bald intimidation."
"I assure you, Senator, no military units shall cross the Pale," the dead general said flatly. "Not without due order by this council."
"There'll be civil war if they do," Ax Milnk said. "And all of us will lose everything."
The plagueman raised his eyebrows. That much was true. The Empire was perpetually balanced on a knife's edge between gray and pink, the dead and the living, military and economic power. The military forces stationed on Home were as carefully equilibrated as the rest of the fragile mechanism, with units hailing from pink worlds and gray. Any military move against the Senate would be met with an equal counterforce. A disaster.
"Please, let us calm ourselves," Henders insisted, obviously flustered at his fellow senators' abuse of the sovereign. "Sire, what is this attack you speak of?"
The Emperor nodded, visibly working to calm himself. "Of course, we must explain. No doubt events today may have seemed precipitous. But we are sure that once you've heard the facts you will understand our actions."
The pink senators and Milnk responded with stony silence.
The risen general leaned forward, gesturing to bring an image of Nara Oxham onto the central airscreen. The plagueman recognized it from her trial, clipped from the newsfeed of only an hour before.
"Counselors, during the trial of Senator Nara Oxham, we discovered that a neural virus was being transmitted from the Senate floor. The virus used the newsfeed as a carrier wave, instantly affecting a small but vulnerable portion of the capital's populace. The virus caused nausea, seizures, paralysis. We believe that the effect would have spread to the entire population had the broadcast continued. Fortunately, the Apparatus acted quickly, shutting off the attack at its source."
The council chamber was silent as those assembled digested the general's words. The plagueman quietly searched the database within his biosuit. He found references to visual stimuli that could cause seizures, but only to a small percentage of human beings, most often children, and nothing that could be hidden inside a normal news-feed. This was an unprecedented weapon, if the general's words were true.
"This sounds incredible," the Utopian said. "Nothing but a pretext for silencing Senator Oxham." He turned toward the plagueman and Milnk. "We heard more than you did, before we were summoned away. After the newsfeed was cut, Oxham accused the Emperor of murdering his sister. And she claims that the symbiant's immortality is a lie."
"Incredible stories seem to abound today," the Emperor said.
"If Oxham is lying, then why concoct this story to cut her off?" the Expansionist senator countered.
"The palace had nothing to do with the decision," the Emperor said. "As I said, the media monitors found themselves under attack, in great pain. They acted in self-preservation."
"That much may be true," the plagueman said quietly. "Oxham's words seemed to have effected the Apparatus in particular."
The Emperor started, then fixed the Axis representative with a glare. It was rare for the representative to speak at all, and the sovereign had counted the Axis as an ally throughout the war, especially since the vote on the Legis genocide.
"That may be," the dead admiral said. "We don't understand exactly how the virus works or who is susceptible. But we suspect who is behind it."
"And that would be?" the Utopian said.
"Oxham, and perhaps some elements of the Secularist Party," the general said.
"You have proof of this?" Ax Milnk demanded.
"Give us Oxham, and we'll get the proof," the Emperor said.
"This is utterly transparent," the Utopian said flatly.
The plagueman remained silent as the argument raged, biding his time. The members of the War Council would soon lose all civility, but that hardly mattered. The details of whatever Oxham had discovered were, in their way, unimportant as well. This drama would ultimately be played out in other venues. The pressures that had been too long restrained in the Empire would shortly be released, violently and disruptively, that much was obvious. The Axis had seen this coming for a long time. It had failed in its mission to stabilize the Eighty Worlds. The Rix, with their blockade, their wars, had finally won.
But the plagueman was glad that the Emperor's desperate gamble would allow him one last act of penance here on the council. It was clear that the sovereign would call for a vote, thinking he had five among the eight counselors in his pocket, believing that under cover of the War Council he could move against Oxham, perhaps ultimately against the Senate, and keep the whole unwieldy contraption of the Empire clanking along for a few more decades.
"I shall repay you, Nara Oxham," the plagueman thought to himself. Not just with this vote to save her, but with all it would bring. As much chaos, progress, and the Old Enemy death as she and her party could ever want.
"God is change," he muttered to himself.
Laurent Zai looked down upon the object.
At this point in the Lynx's slow rotation, its dark bulk was beneath his feet, barely discernible through the observation blister's high-impact plastic. Its shape had grown ever more difficult to make out as the Legis sun receded. Now, the object was merely an absence of stars, a giant lump of coal blackening one quarter of the universe.
The Lynx was still studiously avoiding communication with the thing. The frigate's mass detectors were the only sensors trained on its position; mass was the one aspect of itself the object couldn't modulate, and thus use to signal the Lynx. Zai felt safer this way, cut off from the mind. One of Alexander's secrets had already brought the Empire to the brink of civil war.