Detective Sam Carter had been following the Thief of Stars for months, his last trace always seeming to vanish just a moment before she whisked onto the scene in a scream of sirens and a flare of light. From the Crown of Polphyrion in the Grand Gallery, the whistling wind blowing through the perfectly circular hole cut through the diamond-laced glass, to the Baton of Marshal Hent lifted from its plinth in the museum, he just had a way of getting to things that should be impossible to get to.

That last one had had its own damn gravity well, and still he'd scooped it off and sailed into the Martian sunset. With a taunting note, as always, One Last Heist written in fine red ink. He'd gotten sloppy, though, leaving traces of DNA- not of man nor Martian, but of a flower that only grew in the valley outside Colan'qa, and employees of the hotel had confirmed the sighting of a human male- height 1.84 meters, brown hair, a smile that left you dazzled and not quite sure what he'd been doing...

He had a way of doing that, the Thief of Stars. She could still remember the gala back on Earth, when he'd swept alongside her in a suit that barely made a whisper when he moved, a blur of champagne and cheer and glinting eyes that had stolen the strength from her step whenever he looked at her.

But now, this time, Sam Carter was ready, finger lining the side of her pistol and breath slow and shallow. Here at the Old Olympus, where lilies never seen on Earth bloomed in the valley below, the baroque architecture growing dim in the dusk of the terraformed sky. She didn't know what he was planning to steal this time... but she wouldn't let him get it. A two-knuckled knock at the door, and... that voice, saying to come in.

There he was, the Thief of Stars, leaning up against the doorway with one hand running through his hair and the other gently taking hold of her own. Even like this, she could feel her knees protest, as the door clicked shut. She should be pinning him to the ground, his wrists clenched tight behind her back, but...

Well, that was always how she ended up, eventually, when they met. Already she could feel the familiar hands slip around her waist, her adversary's lips firm but gentle on hers. And there was the telltale quiver between her thighs, and the liquid warmth coiling its way around her heart.

That's it, she realized. The last heist of them all, as the stars twinkled in his eyes, promising another assignation in the twilight. Her heart.

He always did have a way of getting to things that should be impossible to steal.

Let's take a trip to the Mars of yesterday and tomorrow, a gorgeous red planet set abloom by science and home to a thousand intrigues among the glass domes of habitats and the strange, loping stride of alien beasts. Some things, even far into the future, have a way of eluding our grasp, although the chase continues. And somewhere out there, just past Olympus Mons, we might find something worth stealing.

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