Base Functions - Episode III: Temple of S.A.R.A.H., #3

By Ben Winston

Eric and his new friends have done wonders for Alliance forces at Apollo Base. But the enemy threat still lurks within the system. Even after Sarah gets a new hardware upgrade, will it be enough to defend the system and Earth? It is always darkest before the dawn - It is very dark on the moon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Space Publications, LLC.
• Release date: May 18, 2015
• ISBN: 9781507042984

Ben Winston

Ben Winston (1965 - ?) was born in Iowa and grew up in Minnesota on the family dairy farm. Upon reaching adulthood, he joined the United States Army as a communications technician. Before getting out of the military, he decided to go to school for computer electronics. Shortly after getting out of the military, and after getting a new job with an over-seas company, he was diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease. A month after beginning the new job, he was laid off due to budget over-runs on the project he was hired for. Upon returning to the United States, he had difficulty maintaining employment because of the chronic illness. He began writing as a form of stress release, from being home bound and not being able to work, and found he liked writing erotica. Ben wrote a trilogy called the Talosian Chronicles (Currently in rewrite to remove the graphic sex and finalized his vision of the story). The first book, Star Dancer, won awards and was nominated for many others by the online communities where it was posted. Ben Winston returned to school for literature, after completion, he began writing professionally. Being an avid fan of science fiction he focused on this genre. He was, and still is, influenced and inspired by Gene Roddenberry, Anne McCaffery, David Weber, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. Some of his favorite movies and TV shows are; Battlestar Galactica (both versions), Andromeda, Star Trek, Firefly, Star Wars, and many of the B-rated movies that were actually box-office bombs.

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All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Base Functions – Episode III

Cowan Residence

Alliance Apollo Base

Selene, Earth’s Moon

Sol System

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You know there is one thing that I've always wondered about. On Earth, programming languages are pretty much the same no matter what your native language might be. But since I've always been a fan of Science Fiction, I wondered about how that would work among alien races.

As it turns out, each race has its own versions of programming languages. That is to say, the code written in, say Simonian, is completely incomprehensible to a human, but it does almost exactly the same thing. The same holds true for all the other races as well, including Novan, which, ironically enough, is the closest language to our own.

Among the races of the Alliance, there is some debate as to who the oldest race actually is. However, the most common belief is that the Shallans are the oldest. The Veranorians once supported that hypothesis, but have since recanted it, in favor of fostering the belief that they are the oldest race.

When I asked Sarah to translate a copy of her code into all the other languages, she of course included Shallan; and that's where it started getting weird. Once the translation into Shallan was completed, her search routines began offering up references to historical writings in a supposedly dead language dating back over a million years.

You see, Simonians, by nature, are very curious beings. So once they took to space, a close second to their colonization efforts was archeology and exploration. Spatially, the Shallans were a distant neighbor between the Simonian and the Veranorians. Both occupying the next 'arm' of the galaxy.

Sharing the same 'arm', the explorers quickly discovered the Novans, (Earth is also in the same 'arm' but farther rim ward.) and after a few years of tension, became allies.

However, explorers in the Veranorian arm began finding abandoned planets that had been victims of a long forgotten war. Entire cities had been located and much of the culture of the once large, star spanning race was still available, locked away in sealed archives.

The Simonians named the race Loenarians.

It took many years of exploration, and discovery for the Loenarian trail to lead them to the border of Shallan space. It was there that the Simonians were stopped cold. Millions of light-years from home, the exploration fleet encountered an armada of unknown warships.

At the time, the Simonians had never met the Shallans and had no dealings with any other races other than the Novans. Experience prompted the Simonians to ask if it would be possible to talk and perhaps agree to a peace treaty between them.

Their reply came in a text only message, surprisingly, in the Simonians native language. It stated that the only way there would be peace was if the Simonians left and never returned. The new race would not proceed any further than the point they were at now, but the Simonians would be destroyed if they tried to enter their space.

With no other choice open to them, and the other race unwilling to talk, the Simonians turned back. However, they still had a great deal of worlds to explore and continued to attempt to solve the puzzle they now believed had been left for them by the Loenarians.

Now, that puzzle has never been solved; however, the Loenarian language was very close to Shallan, although any requests for information sent to the Shallans, via the Veranorian Ambassador, had been ignored.

However, Sarah had shown me that a surprisingly large amount of her code translated to Shallan, matched a good portion of the undecipherable text left by the Loenarians. I briefly wondered if the Shallans were, in fact, the remnants of that ancient race.

That thought brought on a whole bag full of other questions. For example; if the Shallans were the descendants of the Loenarians, what happened to them that destroyed their very large empire? Why were the Veranorians the only race they seemed to trust? Why were they so xenophobic?

Well, I did know one thing; I wasn't an archeologist or a politician, so those questions must be left for others to resolve.

Other than that brief contact with the Simonian exploration fleet, the Shallans had restricted all other racial contact to that conducted through the Veranorians. Considering recent developments, it didn’t occur to anyone that perhaps the Shallans weren’t actually xenophobic. As it happened, shortly after I released the translated AI code to the researchers on the base, one very bold Shallan, Halflan Therinate, the senior ship designer on the base, approached Logical Engineer Corhen Nori and asked to speak to me, in private.

To say it was odd would be an understatement, frankly the request surprised me, but I wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to meet a member of this reclusive and mysterious race. I agreed to the meeting, but the Shallan had made a point to ask that the meeting be held in my home. Even though it was breaking a long standing tradition in attempting to make contact with a race other than the Veranorians, I would have thought he would have wanted it to take place in a less... intimate, setting.

Looking up what a Shallan and a Veranorian would consider to be palatable, my family took up the task of preparing an appropriate meal for our visitors. It turned out that Veranorians did not eat in social situations, but would attend the dinner while the rest of us did. We made sure that there was a very nice bottle of Veranorian wine available for LE Nori. However, Sarah had to resort to asking LE Nori for information on the Shallans since nothing had been in the information she had access too. My surprise at the initial request paled at what I learned at that dinner.

I was wondering if I should invite Commodore Vance, but I didn’t want to offend my guests by including the Commodore when the Shallan indicated he wanted privacy.

By the time the dinner rolled around, to say I was curious was an understatement. Logical Engineer Corhen Nori arrived with a small cloaked and hooded figure that seemed very nervous. I invited them in, and the small Shallan seemed to relax slightly once the door was closed.

I escorted the pair into our dining area, introduced them to my family, and showed them to seats. The Shallan, hesitated slightly before boldly pushing off the hood and removing the cloak. We had been told that Shallans looked like cousin ‘It’ from the Addams family, only with more hair. That, as it turned out, was incorrect. Of course, the Shallan wasn’t the male Halflan Therinate we were expecting either.

The being revealed when robe was removed was female, and looked more like an Elf or a Halfling than a hair-covered being. I am Sheiriline Therinate, First Daughter to Design Master Therinate of the twenty-seventh house. For the purpose of this meeting, I have the voice of the Shallan Protectorate.

Corhen Nori looked shocked, and a little frightened. Forgive me Mistress Sheiriline, but I have been lead to believe that the Protectorate was a myth!

No, Matriarch, the Protectorate is very real, but we are hidden from the Veranorian Masters of the core worlds. Sheiriline bowed to her hosts, and took her seat. My apologies, Doctor Cowan and family. There is a tale here. One I will be happy to tell to you. However, please understand that once I do this, I will be considered an outcast to my people. If I ever return to the Shallan core worlds, my family will be executed.

If this puts you at such a risk, First Daughter, why are you here? I asked. ‘First Daughter’ was the preferred form of address once she had identified herself as such. It indicated that she was here with her father’s, and by extension, her family’s complete approval, making them a part of the ‘crime’ she was about to commit.

"The Veranorian Synod has decreed that the retelling of our history is punishable by death.