The head of the development team turned to Nico with a huge smile on her face. “Stealth technology operating at one hundred percent. Weapons are online. We are good to go, leader.”

Nico set the course and began the strafing run past the pods. Approaching from the rear would make it easier to match their speed after they dropped out of warp, and a distance of fifty kilometres should be enough to get the maximum dispersion pattern of the Disruptor to hit them all.

The drives hummed a happy tune through the hull as they were auto-adjusted to slower-than-light speed travel, accompanied by a low whistle of the capacitors charging for the Disruptor.

“I like it. No matter what we’re doing, it sings to us. I am not sure how that will go over with the rest of the Reavers. Some humans are quite sensitive to certain frequencies, and the humming might give them headaches. I might need to introduce some sound dampening to silence the interior of the ship.” Nico muttered, half to herself, as the shuttle moved into position.

“Noise cancelling at this level shouldn’t be an issue. it’s only fifteen decibels, barely more than a whisper to most species, so even the low-tech noise cancelling from cheap headphones would do the job.” The Envoy chuckled.

“Good point. I have my audio sensitivity cranked right now, so I can hear if there are any issues with the ship, so it seemed much louder to me.” Nico agreed.

“Ready to fire in ten seconds.” The lead researcher informed the crew, bringing everyone’s attention back to their course.

As the Disruptor began its attack, warning lights began to flash all over the monitoring devices of the developers.

“It looks like the Stealth Technology can’t handle the Disruptor fire. The interference is too much, and it has been deactivated while we are firing.” Nico explained to the others with a sigh.

“That’s not unexpected. Even our stealth technology can’t be active during a high-energy burst. What sort of modulation did you try to get around the issue?” The envoy asked.

“Our plan was to exclude the nose of the ship from the cloaking field so that the Disruptor could fire past it, leaving only a small portion of the ship visible, but the residual radiation in the area of the projector was too much, and it collapsed the field entirely.

If we move the barrier further back, we might get away with keeping the cloaking field up, but the Disruptor energy disperses all over the hull, so it might not be possible at all with this particular weapon.”

The envoy nodded, then tapped some more data into her tablet before taking the time to watch the disruptor eliminate the Klem pods on the screen.

“Though we aren’t hidden during the attack, I must say, it is surprisingly effective. With such wide dispersion, I had expected that the lethality of the weapon would drop exponentially, but it seems that it is still quite effective, even at this distance.”

“We have had a lot of practice fine-tuning the projectors to make the Disruptors behave exactly as we want them to. They were originally only lethal to roughly one hundred meters and had a very limited application, but now that we have gotten through a few generations of improvements, they are one of the most versatile weapons in our arsenal.

Not necessarily the most lethal, but being able to use them in almost any situation, with very few known targets who can resist them, has made them the go-to weapon for new ships.” Nico agreed.

While they finished off the Klem pods, Max was back in his office, with the ship’s sensors at maximum sensitivity, searching for the Shuttle so that he could provide data on the effectiveness of the Cloaking Field.

When it was very close to the ship, Max had no problems finding it with the sensors. It showed as a spatial anomaly, and from there, he could extrapolate what it was. Once it got to ten thousand kilometres away, he couldn’t find any trace of it anymore until it went to warp. The activation of the field was enough to give it away again for over half a second, and he could even calculate their likely trajectory from the data.

They would have to work on that, as it was a rather obvious vulnerability.

Then it appeared again, a few star systems away, and destroyed a wave of Klem Pods for a weapons test before disappearing. At that distance, the sensor aboard Terminus didn’t detect it going to warp, but logically they should be returning to the ship.

He had to say, it was a rather impressive showing, at least to their technology. The next person to ask was Huntress Khan, whose ship should be able to detect much more than Terminus could since they had optimized it for hunting, and that would include tracking targets that tried to hide and flee.

[Huntress Khan, what did you think of our first trial of human cloaking technology?] He sent to her ship without any explanation.

[It’s not bad. I don’t think that the Alliance ship even saw them leave until they went to warp. But there is a flaw in thermal imaging. When it is in front of another object, from the point of view of our sensors, it shows as void cold, which makes a visible blip in the heat signature. It’s minuscule, and I wouldn’t call it a full-out failure since it’s better than most cloaking fields that we have come across, but it still needs some improvements.

I will send your research team the data from our sensor logs, and then they can modify the field the best that they can.

If my calculations are right, they should be back here in twenty seconds.

Ah, yes, there they are. They just entered the system. Look for the cold spot in front of the outlying asteroid belt.]

Max searched but didn’t find anything at all. In fact, he didn’t pick them up until the same spot as he lost them the first time, ten thousand kilometres from the hull of Terminus.

[Thanks, Huntress. It seems our sensors are a bit lacking, but I will have them get right on the improvements.]

[I look forward to it. Hide and Seek is only fun if everyone knows how to hide.]