“Hey, lieutenant!”

Tony Loemanako, face mostly a mask of shredded flesh pocked with the green tags where the rapid regrowth bios were embedded. Still grinning, but far too much of far too many teeth visible on the left side.

“You made it out, lieutenant! Way to go!”

He turned about in the crowd.

“Hey, Eddie. Kwok. The lieutenant made it.”

Kwok Yuen Yee, both eye sockets packed tight with bright orange tissue incubator jelly. An externally-mounted microcam welded to her skull provided videoscan for the interim. Her hands were being regrown on skeletal black carbon fibre. The new tissue looked wet and raw.

“Lieutenant. We thought—”

“Lieutenant Kovacs!”

Eddie Munharto, propped up in a mobility suit while the bios regrew his right arm and both legs from the ragged shreds that the smart shrapnel had left.

“Good to see you, lieutenant! See, we’re all on the mend. The 391 platoon be back up to kick some Kempist ass in a couple of months, no worries.”

Carrera’s Wedge combat sleeves are currently supplied by Khumalo Biosystems. State-of-the-art Khumalo combat biotech runs some charming custom extras, notable among them a serotonin shutout system that improves your capacity for mindless violence and minute scrapings of wolf gene that give you added speed and savagery together with an enhanced tendency to pack loyalty that hurts like upwelling tears. Looking at the mangled survivors of the platoon around me, I felt my throat start to ache.

“Man, we tanked them, didn’t we?” said Munharto, gesturing flipper-like with his one remaining limb. “Seen the milflash yesterday.”

Kwok’s microcam swivelled, making minute hydraulic sounds.

“You taking the new 391, sir?”