Crew: ____________________

The Malice is the cheapest thing TriStar builds and, by a margin the company finds funnier every year, the most versatile. It began in 3011 as a number on a requirement — a fifty-ton tank the Tennessee Star Guards could field for under a million C-bills — and the answer the design bureau returned was less a tank than a socket: a rugged wheeled hull, a Greene & Harvester independent suspension with automatic tyre-pressure regulation, a deliberately "soldier-proof" electronics suite, and a modular turret ring onto which the March could bolt very nearly any weapon in the inventory. One chassis, one drivetrain, one training pipeline, one spares bin — and a turret catalog that turns the same vehicle into a skirmisher, a missile carrier, a door-knocker, a tube-artillery piece, a TAG spotter, or an Arrow IV battery depending on which turret cleared the depot that morning. It is the wheeled eldest of the 'Mal' family — the Malcontent put the same idea on tracks, the Malevolent on air cushion — and it is Common Heart's whole thesis rendered in the humblest possible metal: buy the hull by the hundred, and let the mission pick the gun.