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“Yeah, I know those assholes.”
“Well, this special metal we found is the only thing we know of that can stop them from messing with people’s minds.”
Zo-Fee peered inside the helmet, running her fingers over the inner surface. “You did a good job with the metal leaf to get an even coating. Why didn’t you melt it?”
Tark shook his head. “Every time I melted it, the metal degraded. It wasn’t the same alloy when it cooled.”
“So heat smelts it instead of melting it,” she said. “Sounds like there’s something special about its crystal structure that wasn’t replicated under your conditions.”
“Uhh, sure?” Tark shot me a puzzled look.
I shrugged. I sure as frek didn’t know the difference between “smelt” and “melt.”
“Rolling it out into a foil is a smart fix.” Zo-Fee looked up from the helmet. “So what’s the problem?”
“Thanks.” Tark beamed at her words. Then his smile faded. “The problem is we don’t have enough of this metal to make all the helmets we need, let alone try to design something less cumbersome, like a protected room in a ship.” He paused and glanced at me, already getting better at letting me talk.
“The Grug have been buying up all of the zurilium anyone mined for the last couple of decades and throwing it into stars to destroy it,” I said. “No one realized what they were doing until recently because we didn’t know what this metal could do.”
“So why don’t you just manufacture more zurilium instead of mining it?” Zo-Fee held up the helmet. “This can’t be made up of an unknown element.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because all the new elements with big numbers on the periodic table are highly radioactive and unstable. They exist for only nanoseconds under special lab conditions. You could never make something like this with them.” She tapped the glass of the helmet with her fingernail, tick, tick, tick. “So it’s got to be an alloy of metals you already have.”
Tark’s mouth open and closed several times, then he rubbed at the back of his neck. “I never thought of that.”
“Why would you? It’s not your field.” Zo-Fee gave a one-shouldered shrug, then broke into a grin. “But it’s what I do. I might be a mining engineer, but I’m also a metallurgist. It’s one of the reasons I was chosen for the ARK Program—I could set up our new colony’s mining operations and also process what we mined.”
Pride and love welled in my chest. My mate was smart. Of that, I’d had no doubt—her intelligence had gleamed in her eyes from the first moment we met.
Yet I’d had no idea of her true brilliance until now.
Goddess, you have given your son such a gift.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Sofie
After lunch, Raxnor and Tark went to the cockpit to finalize our rendezvous with their main ship.
I remained in the main cabin, time smearing into a blur of text moving over Raxnor’s phone screen.
Even Lila’s little leg pokes didn’t do much. When her horns jabbed into me for the third time, I pulled my legs up onto my seat to sit cross-legged.
“Friend no fun!”
“This is important!” I said. “I’m looking for a way to fight the bad aliens that put you in a cage.”
A shiver of fear brushed my mind, snapping me out of my daze.
Mierda! I didn’t mean to do that!The last thing she deserved was to be reminded of her trauma. I set the phone aside and patted my legs. “I’m sorry, niña. Come here for a cuddle.”
She leaped up, curling up in the basket my crossed legs made for her. I buried my fingers in the soft purple fur around her cheeks and chin and gave a good scratch until her eyes slitted and a purr filled the air.
Contentment hummed through my mind, and I kept her on my lap even when my duty prodded me to pick up the phone and start searching again.
Those big purple eyes blinked up at me.“Friend keep bad ones away?”
