I have a theory about the Thrones...
I don't think that they're really part of CB - or at least not the Ptolemais's CB. It now appears that CB arranged to have a research and manufacturing facility built out near Jupiter. Apparently there was an accident of some sort (or possibly an attack... I'm guessing an accident, however), at least one person died (the floating body), and the staff wiped the records before leaving. This was apparently 120 years prior to the start of the series. I believe the intro sequence was supposed to be set 80 years prior to the start of the series. My guess is that at some point CB split into two factions. The Ptolemais's faction set up the facility at Jupiter and built the five solar furnaces. Something Bad (tm) happened (you don't normally leave bodies floating in an abandoned space station if you pulled out as scheduled), the station was evacuated, and the purple Haro got left behind (possibly accidentally, possibly on purpose). The other faction (referred to from here on out as Red CB, or RCB) then went looking for the station, and two members of that faction found it as shown in the intro. They couldn't find any records in the databanks, but found the Haro which had been left behind. They used the data in the Haro to construct their own furnaces. But because they didn't have all of CB's data on building solar furnaces, they had to do some development on their own. And as a result they ended up with the red glow from their furnaces, and very different weapons systems. I suspect that RCB has the same general goal as CB, but it may be different in a few key ways. They haven't made a move before now because 1.) They wanted to make sure that CB had committed its forces before getting involved. Otherwise, CB might have remained in the wings until an opportune moment arose to screw things up for RCB. 2.) By waiting until CB found itself in a hopeless situation, they reinforced the idea that they were further up the CB 'chain of knowledge' than the Ptolemais's crew. This gave them more credibility than they would have had otherwise. One key thing to note is that they don't appear to have their own version of Veda. So they needed to access it in order to get information to help with their planning (possibly yet another reason why they waited - to cause CB to reveal the location of Veda). But it's unknown how much data Nene got from Veda, or exactly what she did while she was in the chamber with it. So that may not be an issue for them anymore (as is effectively noted when it's mentioned that the data from the analysis of the Throne MS was placed on a terminal not hooked in to Veda). junior
