Endeavour seemed to have leapt into warp, departing Neptune. To Alona, it seemed like the ship had a particular vibe to it, which may be the inertial dampeners but, it seemed like the ship was happy to be at warp. Traveling at the ships normal cruising speed of Warp 8, it felt the most active, the most "alive". 'Think happy thoughts' she thought.

"I want to know when we're around 20 light years from our side of the Romulan Neutral Zone, have us come to all stop at around 15 light years please" Alona said, then turned to Kim, "My ready room please" stood and walked into her ready room. Kim followed.

As the door shut, she said nothing, turned to her replicator "Cappuccino, hot, lightly sweetened, light cream" it materialized and she looked over her shoulder at Kim, "Want anything?" she asked. "No, thank you" he said, he was sure she was going to talk to him about Kolaas questioning her orders. Although, he was justified in questioning her order, perhaps it would have been better had he done it in private, not in front of the other senior staff, the junior officers on the bridge at the time, and the rest of the bridge watch.

Alona grasped her cup and turned to Kim. "We'll need to figure out a way through the sensor buoy net that the Romulans have set up along the Neutral Zone border. Its a tight net, but the buoys only have a maximum scanning range of ten light years, so to supplement that deficiency they stacked a bunch of them out there. Any thoughts?" she asked.

Kim was taken aback a little. He was sure she was going to question him about Kolaas. Alona could tell by the look on his face that he was thinking this talk was about something else, "Whats on your mind?" she asked.

"I thought you may have wanted to talk about Kolaas questioning your orders in front of everyone" Kim said.

"Nah, he was justified in questioning it. Hell, he's practically required to question the order, so no I am not mad at him, even if he questioned my orders in front of everyone. It was good that he did it in front of everyone, shows that he takes his duties and responsibilities seriously"

"What Klingon doesn't?"

"Touché"

"Back to my question, any thoughts on that sensor buoy net?"

"Well, we could try out that new Electronic Warfare Suite that was installed. Radis had been talking about it for a while now. We could hack into the buoys and have them shut down"

"No, I don't think shutting them down would work, they would notice once the buoys would start going offline and probably send some ships to find out why. Then again, it may take them a little while to respond"

"Thats even if they respond at all, remember, they are not working with all their resources. For all we know they may not be even monitoring the system"

Alona snorted as she sat down behind her desk, "You better believe that they are monitoring it. All intelligence we have received about their skirmish-based war with the Klingons indicate that they are using it as an early warning system for incursions. If those bouys detect us, especially with our IFF offline, they may decide we are Klingons attacking through Federation space"

IFF or Identification Friend Foe, have been installed on Federation starships since the Dominion War. They are data senders, typically one of the first things another starship will detect when it scans a Federation vessel is whether its a friend or foe, then the IFF would broadcast to the scanning ship what class the scanned ship is, unclassified mission parameters and duties, alert status (basically warning that the ship is at battle stations and all civilian vessels should vacate the area) and so on.

There were instances during the Dominion War where Federation special operatives had commandeered Jem'Hadar vessels but were fired upon by Federation forces. As such, Federation captains and senior staff were taught specific IFF codes for commandeered vessels as well as an IFF system that was installed on all Federation vessels. In the event of a Federation starship that was taken over by the enemy, any of the senior staff would be able to alter the IFF code to broadcast differently to indicate the ship was taken by hostiles and the crew was being held. There were other numerous different condition IFF codes for a ship to broadcast. When an IFF is disabled, the ship will not indicate any information about itself similar to not answering a hail.

"Why do we need our IFF offline?"

"We need to look like a rogue Federation starship, being a Sovereign helps, but its so if we come under attack, we can defend ourselves without causing a 'diplomatic incident' and causing us to go to war against the Romulans"

Kim raised an eyebrow. Alona waved her hand, "Yes, I agree, it sounds like a shitty idea to me too but its in our orders"

Alona tapped her combadge "Benson to Drake, please come to my ready room"

"Aye, Captain" Drake replied.

Kim nodded thoughtfully, perhaps Drake may have an idea with the buoys. He remembered when he was serving on Voyager, how Janeway would rely on him for his technical expertise in all manners, well technical. Drake reminded him of how he was in that regard and considering shes an android, that might actually help. He shook his head slightly. Being a piece of tech, doesn't mean you're good at it, c'mon Harry, you're the damn XO, come up with something, use that technical expertise for something. Its just like putting certain systems in heuristic mode for...wait.

The door chimed. "Come" Alona said.

As Drake entered, Kim looked at Alona, "Wait, what if we have the bouys do a level two or three diagnostic on themselves. They have to do it sometime, so we just need to monitor how often, then, just have it cascade and create a corridor we could go through at maximum warp 'til we're on the other side" he said.

Alona looked at Kim, over at Drake, then back at Kim. She was running it through her head, it sounded like a good plan but she wanted to make sure. "Morgana, for a sensor buoy net, would the plan that Harry just proposed work?" she asked.

Drake glanced at Kim, then back to the Alona "Yes ma'am, however, timing them may be difficult as well as the process may be time consuming. Also ma'am, there is the deadline to consider, which we have four days, 17 hours, and 33 minutes remaining" she said.

"I don't care about how difficult it is, I want to know if its possible we can do it and still get there in time" Alona said.

"We can ma'am, but again, the timing needs to be flawless in order for us to be able to get through undetected" Drake said.

"Good, then I want you and the XO to start working on this immediately"

"This make take some time Captain" Kim said.

"You have three days" Alona said, grinning behind her cup.

Several hours later, Drake chimed the Captain's Ready Room, after a moment she heard a clear "Enter" and she entered. Alona was sitting in a lounge chair, facing the star filled windows, reading a PADD. Drake noticed it was an integrated systems report on the on board EPS conduits. "Captain, Commander Kim and I have completed our simulations on setting the buoys on diagnostic mode, our success ratio has been around 98%. However, during our flight through the corridor I do recommend that the XO takes the conn, he is prepared for the contingencies should something fail" Drake said.

"Excellent, and in only 18 hours. Good, we will start around 0300 hours tomorrow morning, so I would suggest getting some sleep or whatever you do for that time period" Alona said.

"Aye, ma'am"

"Dismissed"

From what the PADD indicated, the overhaul and retrofit to the Endeavour was more extensive than Alona first realized. The amount of power flow through some certain key EPS conduit was close to dangerous. It wasn't if they couldn't handle it, but more along the lines of little room for error. Also, she figured if they got into a good or extended firefight with someone, some of those same conduits are more susceptible to exploding due to the rapid movement of power from one system to the next, such as the engines to the shields and even more so should they receive battle damage.

Aside from that, the report also indicated that the power output from the new High Efficiency Advanced Propulsion Warp Core or HEAPWC (pronounced Heap-Wick) was absolutely astounding. In fact, it produced three times more power than standard Sovereign-class warp cores. Additionally, the HEAPWC pushed Endeavour past the warp 9.9 barrier that most Sovereigns contend with, allowing her to "sprint-warp" or "dash-warp" at Warp 9.997 for an impressive 24 hours making the Endeavour one of the fastest ships in the fleet. It also pushed up her normal cruising speed to anywhere between warp 8 to 9.9. The warp 9.9 barrier that Sovereign-class starships are confined to is due to intense power requirements to operate that class of ship under normal circumstances.

Even with the extra power produced from the HEAPWC, Endeavour still suffered from power problems normally found in Sovereigns, only, not in so much as not having enough power but now having too much available power. Endeavours EPS conduits are handling the load well enough but from what Alona was reading it seems like she might have to have Bari design EPS relays and conduits that can handle the load better or see if there was a way that perhaps bleed off some of the excess power into some other systems. In her opinion though, Alona was happier to have too much power rather than not enough, the better of end of the bargain.

Alona shrugged to herself. She'll find a way. "Computer, what is the time?" Alona asked without looking away from her PADD. "Time on deck is 2237 hours" the computer replied. Alona stood, stretched, cracking her back and elbows. She groaned, that felt good. Leaving her ready room, she stepped on the bridge and looked around. "Hows everything Commander?" she asked Radis. He was Officer of the Watch, "Good Captain, we're still en route to the Romulan border, we should be there in around 4 and a half hours" he said.

Alona nodded, "Good, if you need anything I will be in my quarters" then entered the Turbolift. When she finally laid down 30 minutes later she was asleep by the time her head hit the pillow.

Four hours later...

Captains Log, Stardate 67868.2. We have finally gotten within 20 light years of the Romulan Neutral Zone Border. Unfortunately, there is a sensor buoy net set up that appears to be more sophisticated than we realized, however, I believe the XO and Ops have come up with a plan on how to bypass the network. Utilizing our new EWS, we will hack into the buoys, set them into a diagnostic mode, creating a corridor for us to transit through and at the same time make it look like the buoys are performing their routine yet random diagnostic checks.

"...and that will be how we transit through without being detected" Drake finished. The bridge crew was in the observation conference room, all were thinking about the plan that Kim and her had come up with.

Alona quickly looked around the table, "Any suggestions, thoughts or maybe a problem you see that they didn't?" she asked.

Silence for a moment. "The hardest part would be making this look like their routine checks. From the data we have gathered so far, the checks are at random intervals, with random buoys, so Commander, it may be more of a zig-zag kind of trip than a straight line through a corridor" Radis said. He was the expert on the ships Electronic Warfare Systems after all Electronic Warfare was what he trained for.

In Starfleet, Electronic Warfare was a scoffed at profession, due to the sophistication of modern computers, advanced command and control functions and the capabilities of modern AIs. It was thought that without proper command codes one cannot access any Starfleet computer. However, that thought process changed with the return of Voyager and what happened with her computer systems when she went back in time to the late 1990s. Another example of the fallacy of that belief was how easily Enterprise-E's systems were taken over by the Borg when she was sent back in time.

Defense of the ships computer became a priority, protection of critical data was imperative, so the initial thought was perhaps Starfleets computer systems cannot handle temporal shifts or temporal adjustments. After some secret tests by Section 31, they indicated that Bio-Neural Computer Cores and Isolinear Computer Cores are not effected by temporal shifts, fluxes, anomalies or adjustments, so Electronic Warfare was brought back for extensive testing and study. Radis was one of those particular Electronic Warfare testers, with a doctorate in Cryptography and a master of Electronic Warfare, Radis proved to both Starfleet Command and General Electric that Bio-Neural computer systems could not only be hacked but also it could be done from just about anywhere and no one could stop him.

Radis proved this fact by calling a conference at the oddest of places. While sitting at an enviromental control console in Luna Station, surrounded by several admirals and techs from GE, Radis accessed the U.S.S. James T. Kirk, a Yamato-class Starship with an advanced computer core was at Deep Space Nine, her crew getting ready to depart for a patrol along the Cardassian Border. Without using any command codes or having any knowledge of any of the crew, Radis accessed the ships computer, bypassed the ships AI, and changed the command codes for every officer on board then locked out all command functions on the bridge then shut every system down on board. He managed to do this within a 20 minute period, but after every system being offline for five minutes, the computer automatically brought the Kirk back online. Radis then restored all command controls and functions to their previous state then left the gawking admirals and GE techs where they stood to find a good martini.

It took the Deep Space Nine station staff four months to track down what happened to the ship. They managed to follow the access trail back, not to the Moon, but to Earth. The station staff claimed to have found that a computer terminal in Norwich, England was used to access the Kirk. Starfleet then began to start looking at Electronic Warfare as ways to combat threats or even as peaceful ways to prevent loss of life. Starfleet found that it was easier to lock out guidance systems for weapons or to cause a ship to suddenly lose power over fighting.

After a couple years of use, Electronic Warfare had become an excellent form of defense, especially for civilian vessels as such, many Federation civilian vessels had begun to equip their ships with their own EWS. But, like all new and wonderful things, there was a gross misuse of EWS. The Federation freighter Tuscany, equipped with a sophisticated EWS suite, was en route to Bajor when it came under fire by an Orion syndicate slave ship. Rather than returning fire, the freighter brought up its meager shields and started its EWS suite. They accessed the Orion ships computer core, then the Tuscany promptly shut down the Orion ships matter/anti-matter containment field, causing a warp core breach destroying the ship.

When the Tuscany had arrived at Bajor, they reported in about the encounter with the Orion Syndicate vessel. Starfleet was appalled at the actions of the Tuscany crew, had the crew arrested, her crew was tried, and the freighter and its cargo was impounded. Known as the Tuscany Incident, Starfleet had attack oriented EWS removed from all civilian vessels, but they did authorize civilian vessels to have Electronic Countermeasures. Most EWS are now found only on Starfleet capital ships, while the rest of the fleet just normally have ECS.

Since the Tuscany Incident, Starfleet began to create intensive ECS, aggressive defensive firewalls and command looping. Some countermeasure systems are aggressive enough to piggyback the connection back to the attacking source then implant viruses, fill critical systems with useless data, clog sensors with ghosts and false readings, initiate emergency warp core ejections and so on. Specific command overrides were eventually built into the hardware of the computers and other key ship systems/components rather than the software as an additional layer of protection. Specific electronic countermeasure computers were also developed to combat EWS due to the computers faster reaction times.

"Hard, but not impossible?" Alona asked.

"Yes, ma'am, given that the buoys enter diagnostics mode are random" Radis paused as he brought up a display with the sensor buoy network, "We would have to follow an erratic route through the buoy network such as this one" he entered a command in and it showed the route, twice the route involved the ship having to double back through some of the network. "Or something like this" Another route appeared, similar to the first, but with larger 'S' turns and only doubled back once.

Radis ended up showing them six different routes before everyone understood the idea, "Notice that the various routes require us to double back, make multiple hard turns, slide through narrow gaps and so on. It will be hard but we can do it, Captain, if I may, I can coordinate with Lieutenant Drake and the XO to get us through, after all, they are using my EW system. Its also good that the network is four light years deep, anything more might have been extremely hard to do"

Alona nodded, "Is the XO still going to be manning the helm?"

"No, ma'am, I do recommend we have Kolaas man the helm, he will be able to make the course changes, adjust heading and such while still at Warp, especially if we're sprinting through, much more fluidly than the XO" Radis said, then looked over at Kim "No, offense sir" he added.

Kim smiled, "None taken, the Captain and I trust in your judgement. If the helm requires a steadier hand than mine then by all means, have them man it. What are you going to be doing by the way Mr. Radis?" Kim asked.

"I will be manning the EWS sir, Ms. Drake will be assisting me with course plotting and speed adjustments. Captain, we will have to make quick and sudden course changes, is it possible that Ms. Drake and I take the conn for the duration of the crossing?" Radis replied.

"Of course" Alona replied, then added, "I want you to find a good time to begin the crossing, we'll go from there. In the mean time, I'll get the ship into position for the crossing. I want you three to work out the details and talk to Kolaas, hes currently on duty, that's why he isn't here..Anything else?" Silence.

"Dismissed" Alona said.

The following day...

Alona always operated on a philosophy that no plan will ever work perfectly and to have backup plans to supplement the primary one. She knew that worse case scenario involved her shooting her way through the buoy network and then running like a bat outta hell for the Azure Nebula, however, she didn't think it would come to that though. Perhaps she would be able to persuade the Romulans that her and her crew were defecting to the Romulans, a quick bit of cosmetic adjustments or even holographic projections to make her and some of her crew to have Romulan backgrounds of some kind. The only thing is she would have to keep her shields up in order to prevent anyone beaming aboard and finding out that their still Starfleet.

Alona shook her head, no time to think about that right now. She had to make sure her ship got through this net undetected and that's what she planned to do. The plan to get Endeavour through as quickly as possible, lingering in the middle of a possibly hostile sensor buoy network was not recommended. Alona had the bridge watch crew move the ship to around one million kilometers outside the furthest buoys sensor range and to remain there until the order was given to cross.

"Anything on sensors?" Kim asked.

"Nothing sir, just the buoys are the only thing we're picking up and beyond the network sir is nothing. No cloaked ships, no spatial objects, nothing. Just empty space" T'saal said.

"Very well" Kim said.

A brief moment of silence followed, beeps and chirps from consoles and quiet murmurs from the Radis and Drake were the only thing heard. It was oddly relaxing. Alona was no empath but the bridge did have a calm and collected feeling about it with a sense of anticipation.

After a moment, Alona realized she was holding her breath and exhaled, "Mr. Radis, are you and Ms. Drake ready?" she asked.

"Yes ma'am, permission to take the conn" Drake said.

"Granted. Mr. Kolaas, please listen and execute their orders to the letter at the moment they tell you. I can't emphasize how important it is for us to get through this network undetected" Alona said.

"Aye, Captain" Kolaas said.

Radis cleared his throat, "Alright, Mr. Kolaas, I am updating telemetry to you, head in at this point, full impulse if you please"

"Ahead Full Impulse, Aye" Kolaas said, he was looking at his console following the instructions given.

"May fortune favor the foolish" Alona said quietly and settled back in her chair. The commands to jump to warp, drop out of warp, change course, alter heading, come right or left came quickly after that. Kolaas kept up with their orders amazingly, Alona wasn't sure if he could. But, as Alona thought, a plan never goes perfectly.

With two buoys remaining to slip past, Drake miscalculated a warp jump by a second or two and Endeavour entered the detection envelope of Sensor Buoy 209834. As Endeavour was detected, the buoy pinged the ship, verifying that it was a starship and not a spatial object. Fortunately, Endeavours IFF was offline and did not respond to the sensor ping. The buoys computer thought this over for a moment, then scanned for a warp trail behind the object that was just recently detected. The object did leave behind a warp trail, scans indicated it was ion based, which left 389 different species. Scanning the trail, the buoy determined the plasma decay rate and limited the optional culprits of either the Federation or Romulan vessel.

The buoy knew though that if it was a Romulan vessel, the ship would have responded to the sensor ping. The buoy decided to ping the hull again, and scan the warp trail one more time to verify what it was detecting. Of course, whatever that left a warp trail and did not respond to a sensor ping left the buoy no choice. It understood that there was a possible vessel within it sensor range, therefore, its only action is to notify the operator of the detection. As the the buoy was sending the subspace signal, it suddenly decided that now would be a good time to enter into a level 2 diagnostic mode, cutting off half of the signal it had sent. All of its thinking happened within a 1.0312 second period.

"Son of a bitch, it got a partial signal out" Radis said.

"Get that last buoy down now" Alona said.

"Aye, Captain, its down"

"Mr. Kolaas, get us to the Azure Nebula, maximum warp" Alona commanded.

"Aye, ma'am" Kolaas replied, as the ship was already jumping to warp.

"Lets hope that the signal is garbled when the get it, we should still have some time. T'saal, keep an eye out for ANY other vessel be it cloaked or not, I really don't want to make any friends right now" Alona said.

"At our current speed, whats our ETA to the Azure Nebula?" Kim asked.

"1 hour, 50 minutes, sir" Kolaas replied.

"Conn, two Voldare-class warbirds on an intercept course, ETA 20 minutes at their current speed" T'saal reported.

20 minutes? We could get away with that long of time between us and them. They can't be on an intercept course.

"T'saal, verify the Valdore's are on an intercept course" Alona said.

"Standby" he replied.

"Verified, they are on an intercept course Captain, they are accelerating rapidly, looks like they are trying to match our speed. ETA updated 12 minutes" he said.

Kim looked at Alona, she glanced at him and nodded. Kim sighed, he had hoped he would not have to do this so early in the mission.

"Red Alert, General Quarters. Computer, set Material Condition Zulu throughout the ship"

"Acknowledged" the computer replied.