Flandry's Career

Dominic Flandry's one man mission to track down conspirators on Llynathawyr was cut short when he was kidnapped by the Scothani. After he had single-handedly subverted the Scothani Empire, he was put in charge of Intelligence in the frontier province of Spica. Thus, it was he who dispatched such men as were available to hunt for an escaped enemy agent that was known to be hiding in the province but without success.

In the following two years, Flandry:

was sent to Betelgeuse, where he learned how to lie to a telepath;
entered the Merseian Roidhunate and established an advance base for Naval Intelligence;
had an eventful leave on Terra;
was re-assigned to Spica;
led Intelligence during the conquest of Brae;
on Brae, detected a clue as to the whereabouts of the missing enemy agent;
defeated that agent on Nyanza, thus also preventing a Nyanzan rebellion against the Empire;

- my point being that a significant period of Flandry's career, covering his first three short stories, is so understated that we might miss it.

Here is another interesting detail: "The Game of Glory," about Brae and Nyanza, mentions the breakup of the Commonwealth in its original, unrevised, form, even though it was published two years before "A Plague of Masters," containing the first reference to van Rijn in a Flandry story, so maybe the idea of uniting the van Rijn and Flandry series was around earlier than was thought?