Jessica had been taking time to get familiar with other areas on the deck, today was no different. After the morning training session, she had cleaned up and had breakfast. There was an appreciation for the structure and build for team cohesion. She knew it would serve them all well as long as no one made anything personal on mission.

Walking around the mission planning center, she made notes of the planning tables, spots where you could step aside for conversations and the like. It certainly seemed to have a good layout for planning and workflow. Stifling a yawn, she walked over to the replicator and ordered more coffee. Another late night in the Intel suite the night prior was catching up with the woman.

Khalil stepped out of his quarters and stretched his long frame on the door frame. Following the morning workout routine, he caught up on paperwork and cleaned himself up. Stepping out into the large common area wearing a fresh uniform and bare feet, he danced for a few seconds on the cold metal floor. He looked up and saw that he drew the momentary attention of those at the tables. Proceeding to a vacant table with a slight blush on his face, Khalil put on socks and boots. Now fully clothed, he straightened his uniform and glanced around the common area, offering a sheepish smile to anyone who was still watching.

With his morning routine behind him, he gathered the PADDs he needed for the day and headed toward the turbolift. Engineering could wait a few minutes. There was still time to check in at the Mission Planning Center before reporting for his collateral shift. He entered the room as Jessica was ordering her coffee. One screen on the wall showed shuttle bay, indicating six transports standing by, two in maintenance and two on training maneuvers; the other screen showed a visual representations of of the subspace communication stream currently being received by the ship. “Morning, Firefly, what do you hear?”

She looked over to acknowledge him "Starfield. Good morning Sir. Im just taking some time to check out this space." She grabbed her coffee and stepped away from the replicator before blowing on her drink and aking a sip.

"Prophet told me he's been spending some time here to familiarize with his systems and I figured I couldn't let him get too far ahead of me on it. I just wish I had more of the equipment I need here, but for obvious reasons, we don’t. Odile has been great about making sire they have a suite for me when I need it though."

“Perish the thought,” Starfield quipped. “I must say, I'm impressed with the resources we have here. The Tecumseh had some dedicated facilities for Operators, but they were anything but modern.”

He crossed the room toward the main display, his attention drawn to the subspace transmission stream. For a moment, he studied the shifting patterns and spectral readings, hands settling comfortably at his hips. One particular set of spikes caught his eye.

“Are these Romulan military transmissions?” he asked, pointing toward the E-band readings.

He glanced back toward Firefly, his expression reflecting genuine curiosity rather than any expectation that she'd divulge classified information. Khalil understood well enough that intelligence work came with its own boundaries, and he had no intention of putting her in the awkward position of having to explain them.

“I'm curious how much of this we can determine just from the signal itself,” he added, turning his attention back to the display. “Identifying the source is one thing, but I imagine the patterns tell you quite a bit before you ever get to the actual message.”

"Truth is" she began "We have no way of knowing specifically whom the transmissions belong to. The Romulans like to transmit and relay from random locations as sort of jump points, so we can't always triangulate the main source of what particular traffic always comes from where. Especially with lower band transmissions, they require less power and are harder to detect. But the important thing is as long as we can pick up the transmission, we can catch, record, and analyze it. And if we can decrypt the message, at least we have an idea of the contents for Intelligence to work on further. I've got to give them a lot of credit for their redirects, but they've been doing that as long as I can remember."

Jessica paused for a moment before continuing "I think the most important part of it all though is it helps us find cloaked ships or hidden facilities at times. Even now, it's very dangerous for cloaked ships to send any transmissions. It's like a sonar ping telling anyone listening where you are."

Khalil glanced toward the display, considering the implications.

“There's something else I've been wondering about. If the Romulans are operating multiple cloaked ships in the same area, they still have to navigate around one another. They can't exactly afford to collide because nobody wants to break radio silence.”

He looked back at Jessica.

“Do we know whether any of the transmissions we've been picking up could be associated with coordination between vessels, rather than traffic going to and from a fixed relay? I'm wondering if we might be looking at pieces of a pattern without realizing they're connected.” He paused, then added, “If we could establish that some of those signals are related, we might learn something about how they're operating, even if we never identify the original sender.”

"We honestly dont know. With the encryption they utilize as well as any ciphers, it can take alot of time to figure things out, sometimes months if at all. I wish it were that easy as far as being able to determine what was whay exactly right away, but the Romulans have spent decades wrapped in secrecy and become quite good at it. As far as their coordination, they probably have command assign them routes and areas to cover, so going dark unless there is a situation is likely standard procedure. I wouldn't want to get caught hiding out if I were them either."