Further thoughts on "The Risen Empire"

I was thinking about the fact that the main characters, the protagonists of this novel, are citizens of the Empire, and yet in retrospect it is their Empire (and Emperor) who are guilty of the greatest violence, the most terrible acts. The Rix, who are presented as "the bad guys", and the computer intelligences they serve, are viewed by our protagonists as desperate evils. And yet when the computer intelligence successfully deploys and occupies the entire planetary net, business goes back to normal. The computer "lives" in harmony with the systems that support human lives. And in fact there seem to be computer intelligences (at least one) within the Empire that coexist in harmony and even work to serve the humans.
It is a more subtle and complex novel than at first it seems. The moral quandries are interesting.