The problem, of course, was that the support might well vanish if she and Dame Estelle couldn’t carry through and deliver either the parties behind the drug lab (and, almost certainly, the new weapons, as well), or else demonstrate that those criminals’ activities had been stopped once and for all. And the unhappy truth was that they had achieved exactly nothing further since Hauptman and the courier had taken themselves back through the Basilisk terminus to Manticore.

Honor half-reclined in her chair, crossing her legs and steepling her fingers under her chin while Nimitz napped on the chair back, and tried to think of anything else she might have done. Or, for that matter, might still do.

The tap on the power collector was, she was almost positive, a dead end. Oh, she had no doubt it had been installed when the collector was first put in by the Hauptman Cartel, but despite McKeon’s savage counterattack on Klaus Hauptman and the investigations no doubt underway back home, it was unlikely anyone would ever be able to prove precisely how. If some highly placed individual within the cartel had ordered it, any records which might once have existed had very certainly been destroyed long since. And if someone had slipped it in when the prefabricated collector components were assembled here in Basilisk, it could have been any one or two of scores of people involved in the project. In either case, the chance of ever figuring out who’d done it was astronomically remote.

But Dame Estelle was right about one thing. Tapping off of the Government’s own backup collector had shown a degree of arrogant self-confidence which sat very strangely with how meticulously the lab itself had been hidden. There’d been no need to tap that particular collector. Even if they hadn’t wanted to use their own collector, a geothermal plant, or even a simple hydro generator, installed in the volcanic springs two kilometers from the lab could have provided the needed power. And it could have been run in by wire, without the betraying risk of beamed receptors and relays. It was as if their opponents had a split personality. One side of them hid the presence of their drug-making facilities with obsessive care, but the other ran utterly unnecessary risks that almost seemed to flaunt its nerve by stealing power for those same facilities from its enemies.

And, she thought grimly, there might even be a third personality, given the way the lab had been blown. That had been a terminally stupid thing for any criminal organization to do; the NPA would never give up looking for whoever had ordered it done. It was almost like a deliberate challenge, designed with malice aforethought to goad the authorities into the most violent reaction possible.

The problem was that none of it made sense. Not only did the bad guys seem to be going off in half a dozen directions at once in their planning, but the very scale of the operation was absurd. Dame Estelle was right. Whatever these people were after, it wasn’t the profits from drug running or selling guns to the natives. It smacked of some organized off-world covert operation, but what was its purpose? Arming the Medusans and feeding them drugs that inspired violence had all the earmarks of an effort to engineer a native insurrection, yet no possible Medusan “uprising” could hope to defeat the forces Manticore could put into Basilisk to stop it. There might be a great deal of bloodshed before it ended, but most of the blood would be Medusan, not Manticoran, and the most likely upshot would be a powerful, permanent military presence on Medusa in place of the lightly-armed NPA troopers now stationed there.