SF REVIEWS.NET: Ensign Flandry Starkad is a distant world inhabited by two sentient species--the aquatic Zletovar and the land-borne Tigeries--that has become a pawn in the chess game of interstellar expansion and power between imperial Earth and the alien Merseians. Dominic Flandry, a brash 19-year-old ensign in the Imperial Naval Flight Corps, finds himself caught in the middle of escalating conflicts on Starkad when it becomes apparent that the Merseians may well be engineering hostilities between the two species. But why the Merseians might try to aggravate a situation on this remote world that could lead to interstellar war--indeed, why they might be interested in Starkad in the first place--is more than a little mysterious.