The words are not coming easily today, and my mind is wandering. While plotting out one of the more violent and dramatic actions sequences in From Shattered Stars, I started thinking about what it would actually look like to see a squad of armed Tankers barrelling down the ramp of an Imperial lander.

In the coming fourth novel, we will see much more of Squad Four, the Tankers from Downfall Company's first platoon. These are the same guys who first popped up in List of the Dead, and who returned to assist Elm Caden in The Ravening Deep. As I worked out who would do what, and how violently they would do it, my brain wanted to put faces to the troops.

So this is what I came up with as a Dream Team in the as-yet imaginary movie version of From Shattered Stars...

Of all the regiments in the Imperial Combine's Conventional Air and Ground Assault forces (CAGA), there is none so infamously brutal as Tanker Regiment. Led by Colonel Catark Baiste, the regiment is an armoured fist of muscle and bone. Its sole purpose is to smash, batter, and devastate enemy facilities, neutralising opposing units as traumatically as possible.

Tanker Regiment arose in response to external threats which were difficult to counter using conventional approaches implemented by average humans. Finding that many hostile alien species utilised warriors who were bigger, stronger, and faster than humans, the Imperial Combine set about the task of assembling a task force of soldiers with extreme physiology, soldiers who would be willing to push their bodies beyond those extremes artificially.

Over time the benefit of this strategic resource was made clear repeatedly, and the initiative was expanded many times over. For administrative purposes, the soldiers involved in the programme were reorganised into a single unit. Thus was Tanker Regiment born.

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