We see Gorzun attacked by Terrans.
Manuel Argos leads his crew of liberated human slaves in their captured Gorzuni ship renamed the Revenge. Knowing the native language, he talks his way past a guardian warship on the transonic communicator. The narrator wonders whether Manuel is human.
Using captured maps, the "'...men of Sol...'" (p. 358):
destroy a spaceport;
destroy a second spaceport and the spaceship above it;
surviving space interceptors and ground missiles, destroy a third base;
traversing hyperspace within a planetary system (tricky), destroy the three colonies on the next planet.
The men howl like wolves. Realizing that a racist empire cannot remain stable, Manuel declares that all races will be equal and that, as in the Roman Empire, worthy individuals will be able to become citizens.
Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012) -
We see Gorzun, now called Gorrazan, attacked by Merseians.
Qanryf Bryadan Arrowswift, Vach Hallen, leads a squadron to Gorrazan and destroys defense ships while broadcasting propaganda. From Bryadan's cruiser Tryntaf, Afal Uroch the Lucky of the Vach Rueth leads an escadrille of twenty six-male Fangryf-type gunboats "...midway between Terran Comet and Conqueror classes..." (p. 309).
The Merseians fly around the planet, defeating defense craft. Uroch flies between peaks as his pursuers crash into them. His and the eighteen other surviving Merseian craft hide in a hurricane which brings them to the shore where they destroy their target, thus helping the Liberation Council against the Folkmoot. They fight their way back into space and rejoin the Tryntaf.
This account presents slightly more information about the Gorrazani.
1 comment:
Hi, Paul!
I did wonder if it was plausible for the single warship commanded by Manuel Argos to do as much damage to the Gorzuni/Gorrazani was we see reported in "The Star Plunderer." However, I can see how decadence, laxness, and incompetence might enable a single warship with a daring commander could inflict vastly disproportionate damage on the enemy.
The fact that Merseia had to send an entire space FLEET with its auxiliaries in order to carry out its diversionary raid on Gorrazan shows how that race had modernized its armed forces since Manuel Argos time.
Moreover, we do see how the Empire lived up to the Founder's determination to enforce legal equality between all the races inside the Empire (and any worthy non humans could acquire Terran citizenship). Stories like THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND and THE REBEL WORLDS shows how the Imperial Navy had non human officers (as well as ordinary personnel, as we see in WE CLAIM THESE STARS)..
Altho we don't see mention of it--aside from Sector Governor Muratori's employing of a Ryellian telepath in Chapter 3 of THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN, that logically means non humans could also enter the Imperial civil service. That has led me to wonder if any non humans had ever risen to sit on the Policy Board itself.
Sean
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