I have hesitated to say this, but I really did not like the book. I feel like the characterization was trying too hard to tell me how great Trent was without really showing it, and it seemed almost petty in the way it sniped at prior interpretations of him. I started out not really having any strong feelings about him and ended up hating him out of spite.
(Victor's change of opinion was particularly jarring, as what he was worried about came to pass. The Jaguars did ultimately desert and abandon their oaths).
(Also, I could complain about the whole Victor/Trent dynamic some more, but those complaints should really be aimed at Michael Stackpole, because the entire conflict between the two is due to him forgetting halfway through his own book that Victor wasn't in command of the SLDF at the time. Fotch was. Ultimately, it shouldn't have been Victor's call whether Trent saw action. For that matter, if Fotch got Trent so well, why didn't he make a place for him in the Comguard contingent fighting the Falcons?)
The escape plan was painful to read because it hinged on people forgetting certain well established parts of the universe existed for long periods of time. The garrison had to make a long overland march to get to a distant location because... they forgot dropships existed? Allowing Paul Moon's group to make their heist and Russo Howell's group to ambush them when they could have shuffled their force around in a matter of hours or held a response force in orbit to respond to any attack in a matter of minutes?
The most experienced naval officer in the Inner Sphere responds to reports of unknown contacts by wasting days burning insystem after them rather than remembering he has two warships with lithium fusion batteries which could at the very least jump to a point where he could at least get a clear look at them and cut down his transit time?
It was not a good plan, and it shouldn't have worked at all. And none of the experienced combat officers involved should have expected it to.
Also, on the subject of the plot being moved by the ignorance of the antagonist, l wanna touch on the scene where the Fidelis first encounters the word of blake. The blakists are well informed enough to have tracked sales of exotic components back to this planet (how is not really clear, though I find it hard to believe they could have identified Wayside as a candidate world without knowing about its history), they're well informed enough to recognize the man they meet with as an elemental, this man actually introduces himself as Paul Moon.
So they conclude they're talking to the wolverines? What? None of what they would know would tell them that. Elementals weren't created until the wolverines were already destroyed (for that matter, none of the other equipment Moon's people display was either). Wayside was a known Smoke Jaguar outpost, and Moon is a freaking Smoke Jaguar bloodname. Sure, a guy might not notice some of this, but people who have gone from "someone selling unfamiliar HPG pieces" to "hey, we managed to identify where they're from" would have caught on to enough of that stuff to put the pieces together.
(Also, I think this section was included to torpedo the notion that the Word of Blake and the Wolverines were in cahoots, but I can't be sure, and also it's a hamfisted way to do this)
Also the actual foundations of the fidelis are boiled down to "Trent wrote it all in a book, and we decided it's great, so we did it". No effort was put into actually showing how it was implemented or how these smoke jaguars who literally fled to preserve their culture went through such a radical transition. Their story jumps from the day after Trent died to fifteen years later without so much of a "Hey Paul, can you explain why these radical changes to our society aren't the exact thing we ran away from?"
All in all, it feels like a fix fic by an author who was more interested in puffing up a favored character than concentrating on telling a compelling story. So I'm sorry, but I didn't enjoy it.
