How The Ice Folk Wage War

Juchi the Shaman says of the native Altaian Dwellers/Ice Folk:

"'...they have...grown weak in sheerly material ways. They help us withstand the aggressions from Ulan Baligh; they can do nothing against the might of Merseia.'"
-Poul Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (New York, 2010), p. 377.

The Ice Folk can do a lot against the human enemies of Juchi's tribe. They somehow detected and destroyed hostile aircraft at a distance. When Flandry defaced the Prophet's Tower, he was carried by an aeromedusa controlled by a Dweller who had to cling to a block of ice in order to survive this flight to the tropics.

When the enemy attacks on motor bikes, a Dweller calls through the roots to alert the forest. Hundreds of aeromedusae descend either to electrocute soldiers or to lift them and drop them into a lethally cold lake. Medusae hit by gunfire burst into hydrogen flame and seek men to burn. The retreat becomes a rout.

Making Love, Not War
Bourtai, a nomad woman, wants to be with Flandry but does not know how to initiate a sexual liaison so she just puts herself in his presence until he gets the message but then they are interrupted and Flandry will leave anyway. But he leaves her in the capable hands of his rival.

For background on Altai, see here.

The Secret Message

How to smuggle a secret message off Altai when all spaceships and their crews are watched?

No Altaian can read the Terran principle language, Anglic. Even the Kha Khan reads only Altaian and Alfzarian. He trades with Betelgeuse but his people have been isolated from Terra for centuries. When the fugitive Flandry, under cover of night and storm, paints an Anglic word on the side of the Prophet's Tower, no Altaian can read it and its meaning is irrelevant because its mere location is interpreted as a wilful provocation and insult.

A Betelgeusean trader can read the word and has no way of knowing that he might harm Flandry, whom he believes to be dead, by explaining the Anglic to the Khan Khan. However, although Zalat can read "Mayday" and can infer that this means the first day of the Terrestrial month of May, he cannot know that the Anglic is derived from the English "Mayday" which is based on the French "M'aidez," pronounced "M'aid-ay," meaning "Aid me."

Betelgeuseans will take this story home, where it will be heard by staff of the Terran Embassy. Some weeks later, a Terran ship arrives at Altai...

Thus, Flandry transmits a message that is regarded as an insult, is illegible to all Altaians and incomprehensible to Zalat but easily remembered and repeated by the Betelgeuseans and understood by Flandry's fellow Terrans. And that is far from elementary, Watson!

For how rats have evolved on Altai, see here.

To Altai And Back

For a summary of information on the native Altaians, see here.

OK. I have reconstructed Flandry's itinerary. For the investigation of Altai:

Intelligence shipped him to Betelgeuse, where the Terran Embassy gave him his orders with a dossier and an expense account;

he engaged passage to Altai on a Betelgeusean trading ship.

To return to Terra:

he engaged passage on a Betelgeusean tramp ship as the quickest way to reach the Imperial port at Spica VI, from where he would return home on a luxury liner, the Empress Maia;

however, the tramp stopped on Orma, where a Betelgeusean trader informed him of another isolated human colony, Unan Besar, and he rented a space flitter to go and investigate that planet;

presumably, having liberated Unan Besar, he returned to Orma, thence to Spica VI and Terra, although we next see him, some time later, on Varrak in the Taurian Sector - if you accept my revision of the Chronology in recent posts.