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Ten million tanks!

In many ways it’s a phrase I wish that I had never said out loud. It was at one of the Horus Heresy Weekenders, and I was on a panel talking about the next book I was working on. I think I said something like: ‘The Battle of Tallarn was big, really big. It took a year, and there were ten million tanks involved. Ten million tanks!’

Within the hour it was a Twitter hashtag (#TenMillionTanks!) and four years later it still crops up when people talk about Tallarn in the Horus Heresy. Ah, the power of the meme.

The only problem was that the stories I was going to write – which make up the book you are holding – aren’t about #TenMillionTanks! and they never were going to be.

So why say it?

Part of the answer is to do with scale and research. I did a lot of planning for these stories. I read every scrap of information published about the Battle of Tallarn: the small asides in games written in the 1980s, all of the write-ups in every Imperial Guard Codex, and the mentions in old articles from White Dwarf. Some of those sources were contradictory, of course, but there was a core of facts.

‘It was the biggest armoured engagement in Imperial history.’

‘It lasted for close to a year.’

‘It was estimated that there were ten million tanks and war machines involved, and by the end there were a million wrecks on the surface.’

Now, the largest armoured engagement in human history so far is thought to have been between about six thousand tanks and four thousand aircraft. If you add those figures together on the basis that they are both types of war machine, it gives 0.1 per cent of the forces apparently involved in the fighting on Tallarn.

So it’s a pretty big battle. The #TenMillionTanks! fact gets that scale over really directly. It’s a staggering figure, and one that has always stuck with me.

But why do I sometimes wish I had kept that oh-so-juicy phrase behind my teeth? Because it sets up an expectation that the stories I was going to write would be all about seas of tanks shooting the hell out of each other. And that was not at all what I intended to write.

Having got to this afterword you probably know that, while there is a lot of tank-killing-tank action, the touted #TenMillionTanks! do not take centre stage. And that’s because what drives the stories in this book are five basic questions: