Zmey was not a man. He was not a soldier. He was a weapon, and like all weapons he had been forged and tempered, his edge honed and tested. There was an artistry to him to that so many would overlook, assuming that a product of science would be something formed wholly from a cloth spun of hard fact, cold logic, and sterile pragmatism. This was an uncharitable assumption, because there was just as much passion and vision invested into him as any piece of art in humanity's brief history. There was as much blood, sweat, and tears poured into the making of him as any masterwork that was recognized as a great cultural epic of humanity's disparate and varied people. But because the means by which he was crafted was beyond the minds of so many of Earth's population, the artistry that was in him down to the double helix of his DNA would be overlooked, and because of the ugliness of his purpose in life it would never be considered.<br/><br/>In times of peace he would have been regarded as worse than a parasite - he was the dream of some other fattened parasite made from the vast resources that the bloated military-industrial complex gorged itself upon made reality. In times of peace, when the civilians had the luxury of calling military spending wasteful, to demand instead the money go to all manner of other things - some useful, some not. What good did it do to pay someone to smear paints in unrecognizable shapes upon a canvas? Such things were frivolous and wasteful. A new bridge? A new highway? At least those things had purpose and were useful. But, then, Zmey was not in a position to judge. Art, music, and all of the things that made up culture were things for normal humans who lived in human society. Zmey did not, and could not, live within that same context of shared humanity. He was inhuman, merely an instrument of man's own inhumanity towards man. Although he lived, and breathed, and dreamed, his existence was defined by warfare, either being prepared for it, or engaging in it. It was a circular existence. His history, such as it was, was a history of violence.<br/><br/>He was already fully girt for battle. The Russian superweapon stood in the CIC, as various support staff sat huddled at dozens of screens processing all of the information required to mobilize a modern battle force. A doctor was examining various readouts from Zmey's armour, analyzing with deliberate care hormone levels, blood pressure, heart and respiration rates, and other metabolic data. Everything was within typical parameters; there was no true need to be concerned that Zmey would suffer catastrophic genetic or cellular degeneration as first and second generation NuGenes had been susceptible to. But he was an invest of billions of roubles, and so they monitor. The doctor was, apparently, satisfied with the data and took a blood sample before going back to some laboratory for more tests.<br/><br/>Overhead, a general watched. He was a fat, old man. There were medals pinned to his chest, like the scales of a fish. But Zmey felt only contempt for him and his kind - old, outdated, trained for wars that would never happen again. Either technology would carry humans beyond wars they could even imagine, their current enemy would enforce humanity's extinction, or the species would be reverted to stone age capacity and with the Earth's resources exhausted, would never develop the means to create a more advanced society.<br/><br/>Heavy footfalls carried the thing about the room, his ultimate goal the admiral who would give him a mission. It was odd, to Zmey, the ranking structure - admiral was a naval rank but the appellation ranger suggested ground forces. Perhaps they would eventually be called to serve upon space vessels, but then, the designation marine seemed more likely. It was not something that Zmey would dwell on for long. It was a flitting flight of fancy that vanished as he looked on one screen.<br/><br/>It was her.<br/><br/>Dedika.<br/><br/>The bitch who got away. Zmey watched as the screen relayed data from satellites and communications equipment, relaying her plight from a hundred angles in a hundred different ways. It galled him that she would die like this, in that placed, rather than be ground to dust under his heel.