Flandry's success in this novel is due in equal measure to his outstanding abilities and to external events panning out exactly in his favour. He and his men are shipwrecked on Dido but the rebels have a single hyperdrive craft at a scientific base on that planet. The vessel is easily hijacked and Flandry uses it to disable the base's communications. Thus, he and his men capture the enemy's computer communication codes long before the enemy can know this and change the codes. The McCormac Rebellion is effectively defeated at this point but Flandry manages to finess matters further by assassinating the governor, returning Kathryn McCormac to her rebel husband and letting the rebels flee, thus preventing further slaughter.
It was emphasized earlier that getting the enemy's codes before they are regularly changed is difficult to the point of impossibility yet Flandry does it almost without noticing even before he has become the Captain Flandry of the originally published pulp magazine series.
With men like this, the Terran Empire is not dead yet.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But it could have turned out so very differently so easily! E.g., if the rebels crewing the subdestroyer "Erwin Rommel" had not been so slack and careless, Flandry would very likely had been forced to accept internment. It was that carelessness which gave a bold man like Flandry his chance to seize the ship and its codes.
I recall, when Flandry was confronting McCormac, the latter mentioned he had been working out plans he believe would defeat the Josipist loyalists. Another reason, besides capturing the rebel codes, for Flandry to press on McCormac the wisdom of fleeing, to prevent further slaughter because of those plans.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Strictly speaking, it was Kathryn McCormac, not Flandry, who killed Snelund.
Ad astra! Sean
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