“Alright, let’s give it a shot, shall we?”

Commander Lewis, Lieutenant J.G Morgan, and Chief Petty Officer Shafir crowded around a console in the rear hold of the shuttle. Shafir fiddled with receiver harmonics while the other two watched with bated breath. An encoded and unintelligible byte stream began to flow across it.

“Too much interference is bleeding through from the main channel,” Shafir observed. “It is completely garbling the side channel.” This was by design. It made their hack all but undetectable. The problem was that it also made the side channel unintelligible. “Jace, can you try to clean up this signal?”

“Yeah, give me a moment,” Morgan replied as he rushed over to a second console. “Stream it over to me. Let me try cleaning it up with an IIR band-pass filter.”

A few moments later, the digital signal on Shafir’s display started to resolve itself, becoming a single clean and clear channel. It was still unintelligible, but now for a different reason. “Ok Jace, now bus it through our universal translator.”

“Done.”

Both the screen and the dialogue were complete gibberish to Commander Lewis. He knew how to sneak and how to shoot, but his competence with digital systems ended with the codecs in his tricorder. With the filter and translator applied though, he could now see it clear as day, a direct feed of the Lost Fleet’s comms chatter flowing across the display, every message that hopped across this supernode in the multi-star network topology they’d established to cover the Deneb Sector.

“Good shit you two!” Lewis exclaimed. As Morgan walked back over, Lewis threw one arm over his shoulder, the other around Shafir, and pulled them close, the three of them staring at the juicy intelligence now flying across the screen. “You guys did it. You guys cracked the code. Their traffic is now ours.” He had the look of a proud father on his face.

“Thanks boss!” Shafir beamed.

“I can’t believe that worked…” mused Morgan.

“It was all your idea buddy,” Shafir smiled at him. “You and your nutty 0200 phone call. I’m damn glad now I didn’t just throw my combadge at the wall and go back to sleep when you called.”

“Me too. Me too.”

For all the happiness they were feeling in this moment, it was only the first step. “Now we just have to do this, oh, I don’t know, a half dozen or so more times across the rest of the sector,” Shafir laughed. “And then all their traffic shall be ours.” Still a long way to go.

“Yeah, well once Reyes comes back to get us,” Commander Lewis pointed out as he looked towards the cockpit. “In the meantime, why don’t you two get some rest?” Admiral Reyes and the USS Serenity had left them behind almost seven hours ago, warping away to distract a Jem’Hadar battlecruiser and make sure it didn’t come upon them.

As Shafir and Morgan settled in to get some rest in the rear hold, Commander Lewis made his way to the cockpit where Ensign Elyssia Rel sat at the controls.

“Did they get it?” she asked eagerly as she heard him approach.

“They did indeed!”

Ensign Rel jumped out of her chair and gave him a hug. “Thank you for always believing in us,” she said elatedly. Although she was just the pilot on this sortie, a far cry from Shafir and Morgan when it came to digital systems, she still understood the magnitude of what they had just accomplished. It had the potential to change the face of the war.

“Eh, all I did was tell Eidran we were changing course.”

“Oh, come on Jake. The technobabble that comes out of their mouths is as foreign to you as it is to me, but when they said they could do it, you trusted them,” Rel pointed out. “Just like you trusted us on Nasera.” Commander Lewis was their rock, and as she stared at him with a sense of deep appreciation, she just wanted to be his. These feelings had come on swiftly after the events on Nasera, but intense crises had a way of accelerating such feelings.

Commander Lewis could see the emotion in her eyes, and it brought strange emotions into his own mind. They were uncomfortable. He wasn’t that sort of a person. “Alright, well it’s going to be who knows how long until the Serenity returns,” he said, changing the subject. “Why don’t you go in the back and get some sleep? I’ll take a shift up here.”

“What about if I stay up here with you?” Rel asked with a twinkle in her eye.

It was appealing. It really was. He wanted to take her up on that offer. They still hadn’t talked about what had happened in her quarters the other night. “We still have to do this six more times,” he insisted, pushing these strange feelings from his mind. “Go get some sleep while you can.” She gave him a look of resistance. “Seriously, go get some sleep.”

Elyssia sighed. Maybe someday they’d get a chance to talk about what happened, and maybe someday she’d break through that thick armor of his, but ut for now, she could sense he wasn’t ready. With a discrete brush of her hand across his shoulder, Elyssia relented and retreated from the cockpit.

As Commander Lewis sat there alone looking out at the stars beyond, he wondered how things were going for Allison Reyes and the Serenity. The Duderstadt class light cruiser was fast and sneaky, but Reyes had lit the Serenity up on the sensors of every Dominion ship within a half dozen light years in order to buy them a distraction. That was a lot of heat she’d chosen to bring upon herself.

Several light years away, cross chatter on the bridge of the Serenity was overwhelming. Tactical officers were tacking more than two dozen Jem’Hadar fighters and cruisers converging on their location, coordinating with flight control and navigations as they attempted to chart a course to avoid them all.

“Cruiser bravo is on a direct heading to cut us off.”

“If we adjust to heading three three four, we’ll skirt it by half a light year.”

“Yeah, but fighters whisky and golf will be on top of us then.”

“What about flipping straight around to one eight five?”

“No, sierra has us cut off there.”

Their little stunt had bought Commander Lewis’ team the distraction they needed to finish their work, but in doing so, the Serenity had awoken the hornet’s nest. The Jem’Hadar were dropping a dragnet over them, cutting off every angle of retreat.

“What about if we hide instead of run?” Admiral Reyes cut in.

“How do you figure?” asked Lieutenant Commander Eidran.

“Well, we were invisible before. We just need to get invisible again.”

“Yeah, but now that they’re tracking us actively, we’re not just going to be able to darken the ship and disappear again,” Eidran warned. In amongst asteroids, debris and other objects that littered the stellar landscape, a sensor operator typically couldn’t discern the blip of a darkened ship from the blips of irrelevant objects. However, in this case, they already knew the position of the USS Serenity. Even if she reduced her signature, they’d still know which feint blip to track.

“What do you want to do Commander?” Admiral Reyes shook her head. That was not a productive answer. “Just keep on running as more and more give chase? Find us a solution.”

Lieutenant Commander Eidran stared and stared at the charts, trying to discern how they’d get out of this mess. Then it dawned on him. “What about the Minara Nebula?”

“What about it?”

“It is nearly six light years across, and its anomalies completely befuddle sensors,” Eidran explained. “If we can get inside, they will lose track of us. We can then pop out somewhere else, just another anomalous blip on their sensors.”

“If we don’t blow ourselves up,” cautioned Lieutenant Selik from the conn. The Vulcan was an excellent pilot, but he recognized the challenge the plan would present. “The Minara Nebula is rich with spacetime anomalies, ion storms, and thick particulates that make navigating it safely very difficult.”

Reyes came up alongside him and set her hand on his shoulder reassuringly. “Well then mister Selik, you’ll just have to be extra careful.” she insisted. “Set a course. Maximum warp.” There weren’t really any other options.