Marauder Kronos: Scifi Alien Invasion Romance (Mating Wars) by Aya Morningstar Page B

want to protect you most of all.”
    “Then why not at least let me train to do something other than crack eggs?”
    Delphie stops walking. She turns and lunges at me, grabbing for my throat.
    Tendrils shoot out from my shoulders and swat her away. She falls flat on her back and grunts. She gets back up slowly, then says, “That’s why. You’re already protected.”
    “Sorry!” I shout. “I didn’t even know it was going to do that to you!”
    “It’s fine,” she says. “I was going for the throat, I’m lucky it just knocked me over.”
    So Jerky is already protecting me. That’s why Kronos won’t train me in self-defense?
    “Why did you and Kronos never…,” I start to ask, but I decide not to finish the question, for fear of how awkward it will sound.
    “Me and Kronos?” Delphie says, ears going taut. “That’s….” She laughs. “Never.”
    “But why?” I ask.
    “He’s like…my big brother? I mean not literally, but we could never see each other in that way, you know?”
    “Is there any other reason you’d stay away?”
    She gestures for me to keep following her, and she opens the hatch to the engine room. We get inside and see all the gleaming machinery.
    Attached to the engine is a massive piece of metal, but when I look more closely I see that it’s more like hundreds of incredibly thin sheets coiled together.
    Delphie points at it. “The heatsink.”
    I see a number of thick, cobalt-colored metal tubes snaking out of it and running into the walls.
    “The coils are superconductor nanomaterials,” Delphie says. “So you probably have a good idea how they work.”
    I smile. “At least you know what kind of scientist I am.”
    Delphie scoffs. “You can’t expect Kronos to figure out stuff like that on his own. If you tell him, he’ll remember, but it’s just not his strong point. And no, to answer your question from before, I can’t think of any big reason to stay away. Him being a pirate keeps most women away, but if you can look past that? He’s got a heart of gold.”
    She hands me a small metal cube with a wire attached to it. “Plug this into your tablet and stick it onto the heatsink...but make sure you don’t let your skin touch it.”
    I follow her instructions, being careful not to touch the metal. The cube sticks itself onto the heatsink – it must be magnetized – and my tablet starts to give a temperature readout.
    “Three hundred fifty degrees Celsius,” Delphie says. “That’s a bit too cool.”
    A bead of sweat drips down into my eyebrow, and I wipe it off with my sleeve.
    Delphie points to me. “If your tablet is ever destroyed or something – say we’re under attack, or you find yourself in here with no tools. If you feel the heat in this room, that means the coils are too cool, and you need to adjust this thing here. Any heat you feel in the room is heat that isn’t in the coils.”
    She takes a wrench out from her bag and hooks it onto a big dial, and then she turns it a few centimeters clockwise. “Now the heatsink will take on more of the heat.”
    I watch the readout and see it increase up toward 500 degrees Celsius.
    “Six hundred degrees is the sweet spot,” she says.
    “What if I walk in here and it’s too cold?” I ask.
    “Climate control on the ship is better at keeping it warm than cooling it down, so that usually won’t happen.” She holds up her wrench. “This wrench is aluminum, and it will melt at 660 degrees. So if you touch your wrench to the heatsink or coils and your wrench starts to melt, you need to turn it the other way.”
    “How do I turn it if my wrench is melted?”
    “Very carefully,” Delphie says, smiling.
    Kronos’s voice breaks out over the comms. “We’re entering into a wide Earth orbit, joining the privateer swarm. Prepare for zero-g.”
    “Let’s get back,” Delphie says. “I try to calibrate this every time we run the engines. If it gets out of whack it can cause a chain reaction of fuck-ups. Oh,