Clan Wolf is preparing for the push to Terra. While Clan forces seem to be capable to deal a death blow to the Republic of the Sphere, emergence of another Clan, Jade Falcon, lurking on the fringes, threatens with decimating blow to destroy the Wolves after they expend themselves in fight on Terra.
To succeed Wolves need additional experienced troops and one of the Wolves' analysts, Marotta Kerensky, suggests that famous mercenary outfit - Wolf's Dragoons - needs to join the fight with the Clan Wolf. Khan Alaric agrees with this suggestion and sends Marotta (you gotta love Alaric - you suggested it, then please do execute it :)) to Dragoon's HQ to negotiate their participation in the forthcoming great battle.

Marotta will make contact with Dragoon's, but these are not Dragoon's of the past glory, they have changed and are not exactly what they once were. Inadvertently his actions will cause friction and split between Dragoon officers and push the entire mercenary outfit towards not so clear future.

Although this is relatively short ouverture to final book Hour of the Wolf, it is very interesting tale. All the characters are well presented, especially Marotta, and Dragoons' Crews and Brubaker. Split within Dragoon outfit was not only because of decisions made by Brubaker (including his decisions related to the state of Gamma regiment before Marotta's arrival) - reasons were much deeper. It was basically split between old Dragoons that still had links to Clan Wolf and knew that dominance of Jade Falcon would be age of terror, new Dragoons that saw Clans as greatest danger but saw every Clan as such no matter if they were Wolves or Jade Falcon, and troops that just want to keep on fighting, not necessarily solely for economic gains.

Fighting is very realistic (for an SF setting that is) - effects of all those high power weapons are felt by each and every battlemech. There are a lots of pretty interesting combat set pieces here and I have to wonder how does anyone manage to recover from this level of losses. And I do not mean just weapons and mechas but pilots and mechwarriors. I am looking forward to Hour of the Wolf to see how does large scale battle looks like (in this one everything is given as "skirmish").

Very interesting side-story that will definitely play a major role in the future.

For fans of battletech highly recommended. ( )