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The Tour (part 1)
Posted By: Traumatised Marine<rbecalick@hotmail.com>
Date: 16 March 2003, 3:01 PM
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"Head Professor Zolkievich, the Supreme Chancellor has arrived at the surface of the facility, he'll be down in approximately two minutes!" Said Archimededes, the lab AI.
The Professor and his colleagues assembled in front of the airtight lift doors, awaiting the Supreme Chancellor's arrival.
He was a thin old man with slightly hunched shoulders, a last crown of white hair hung above his ears around his otherwise bald head. His arms were rather long, and the sleeves of his coat did not quite reach his wrists, which irritated him to no end. A pair of rounded spectacles pinched his nose. His face was surprisingly uncreased for someone of his age, perhaps it was because for the larger part of his lifetime he'd had little time to talk with others, therefore his face was unwrinkled by the wear of expressions and speech.
The past few decades had been tough, the Professor could remember a time in his youth when there had been no Covenant. A time when he had been a young Astrophysicist, ready to take his turn in humanity's history to unlock more of the universe's secrets.
However instead of having to go and look for the questions that needed to be answered, he'd had them thrust upon him. When the UNSC had started recovering the first bits of scavenged Covenant technology, he had been immediately under the unrelenting pressure of ONI to discover the answers that the technology held, and he'd given his life to this cause. Despite all the suffering the human race had endured and still was enduring, the Professors life was a fulfilling one. He had never been short of new things to understand, sometimes he would go for days without sleep, examining all that ONI sent down to him in his sterile-white labyrinth.
And now the Supreme Chancellor had requested to see all that had been discovered about the Covenant.
ONI had been very unwilling to allow this, but the Supreme Chancellor was the single most powerful individual in the human empire, and had bullied ONI into it.
The Professor could understand, ever since Earth had lost contact with Reach, things had been looking very grim, the Supreme Chancellor wanted to know some answers before it was too late.
Of course the Professor didn't mind in the slightest giving the Chancellor this little tour, he welcomed a reason to go and take another look at all of his specimens.
The lift was surely on it's way down, the Professor tried to pull down the sleeves of his white lab coat.
The damn things didn't come with long enough sleeves for someone of his physical structure.
He glanced over his shoulder.
On his right was Professor. Moulinaux. She was a short woman, very petite. Her hair was a tired black, tied back in a bun, the occasional frizzy, rogue hair was free of the restraint of her black hair-band, floating lazily in the sterile, recycled air of the lab. It was a striking contrast to her snow-pale face, a face that had likely rarely seen any light but that artificially created by the strong lamps of the laboratory for a good few years. She was quite young in comparison to other people who would have reached her scientific status, and she was exceptionally intelligent, even in terms of those who she worked with.
On the Professor's left was Dr. Hobson. He was a tall man with a rather lanky frame, his lab coat resembled a sail as it hung gaily from his shoulders. His ginger hair and thick beard were streaked with grey and white. His green eyes from below his thick fringe sparkled with sharp understanding. Though Professor Hobson was good-humoured, he was also objective, very candid and often cynical. His voice was a very neutral tone, but every so often it would be dashed with lashings of a British accent, betraying his origins.
There were, of course, others. However Hobson and Moulinaux were the two whom the Professor had known the longest, and for that matter, was the most fond of.
The lift chimed.
The group of scientists all stood silently as the Supreme Chancellor stepped through.
For a moment the Professor was surprised to see that she was alone, not even flanked by her usual company of Neanderthal-resembling, black-clad bodyguards. Then he realised it must have been because of ONI, they didn't want any individual learning the secrets of what was in these laboratories that they could possibly prevent from going in.
She was a very attractive woman. The Professor could of course, recognise this woman very well, she was only the most well known politician in the whole of SolCore, her face was known by every single self-aware human mind throughout all of the colonised planets.
Yet still, she seemed even more beautiful in person.
She was only an inch or so taller than Professor Moulinaux, and wore an ivory white satin blouse and skirt, with a simple sky blue coat upon her top. The simple clothes complimented her well-formed figure perfectly.
And hanging from her neck was a gold necklace, with an amulet about the size of a drinks coaster, bearing the symbol of the SolCore government.
She was a brunette, her hair brushed freely against her shoulders. Her skin was a sun-stroked tan, quite striking in comparison to the familiar, pale faces of those of his colleagues, even those of them who were black were missing a certain element in the tone of their skin that only sunlight could give.
However it was her eyes and mouth that drew the Professor's attention, and surely that of the other male scientists.
Her mouth had clearly smiled many times, it made her face look kind and compassionate. Her eyes were almond-shaped, large and a rich hazel colour. They were warm, focused in such away that her face had an aura.
And she was of course well known for her compassion, she was the overseer for the well being of trillions of people, so she would have to be compassionate.
Yet even her warm facial features had been scarred by the recent events that had befallen humanity. When she had come to power, the Covenant were a problem that ONI wanted to keep secret and the UNSC had insisted they could deal with, a top secret war happening on the most distant colonies.
Now, however, the dark, ugly presence of the Covenant was very real, and very close.
They had lost contact with Reach only a few days ago after a reported Covenant armada of titanic proportions had appeared in slipspace right by the military stronghold. Reach was a galactic step away from Earth, where the Professor's lab was based; on the moon, in orbit around the human homeworld.
The Chancellor fixed her disarming gaze upon Professor Zolkievich.
The Professor didn't falter, however.
"Welcome Supreme Chancellor."
The Chancellor smiled, exposing a delicate set of perfectly white teeth.
"Thank you Head Professor. I hope there were no problems preparing for my request to see your labs?"
"Of course not Supreme Chancellor," Replied the Professor graciously, "At your request we have prepared all the knowledge and material we have in the archives. If you'll follow me, I shall take you for the grand tour. We'll begin with Covenant field weapons, vehicles and warships, and finally the specimens. And of course, I shall be supplementing this with our knowledge of their culture and hypothesise on Covenant history and background."
"Excellent, Professor." Approved the Chancellor.
"Very well," Nodded the Professor, becoming more animated, "Let's begin."
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