Watching Ashley work was the hardest thing Kosar could remember doing. All he wanted to do was sweep her off her feet and fly her off to his lair, but he couldn't. Not while she was doing work for the Empire, and not until she accepted him.

"It wasn't like this in the old days," he grumbled to his deputy after work one evening, and Davenport laughed.

"In the old days you just had to carry a princess off from her castle," she retorted. "Of course it's a bit more complicated with a woman who has a life beyond sewing a tapestry."

Kosar laughed at that, downing his beer and shaking his head. The team often shared drinks after a shift, and the Barsoom was full of Research Center personnel unwinding after a long day. Ashley wasn't amongst them, to Kosar's disappointment — so far, the newcomer hadn't made any real friends here and she didn't seem to be making an effort to. That was a pity, and a worry: Kosar didn't want Ashley to be unhappy.

He shook off those thoughts and turned back to Davenport, who was grinning at him as though she knew what he was feeling. His glower only made her laugh.

"Don't blame me for her not being here, boss," she said, holding up her hands. "It's not my job to drag the science staff out to drink."

Kosar grumbled to himself but he didn't argue. "I'm her mate. Why isn't that enough?"

"Maybe because humans don't work like that? Look, I've been on Mars long enough to know how it goes for you dragons. You find your mate, you know it, and then it all works out, right? It's not like that for us. At least, not when dragons aren't around."

Davenport sighed. "I wish it was that simple, sometimes. But it isn't, we have to work with trial and error. And some guy comes up to a human and says, 'oh this is fate, we're meant to be together' — well, it sets off warning bells."

"You're saying I shouldn't have told her?" That idea was foreign and horrifying to Kosar. Ashley was his mate, and she deserved to know that. They'd be happy together, they belonged together, a dragon's sense for that couldn't be wrong. Hiding it wouldn't just be stupid, it would be cruel.

But Davenport shook her head. "Did I say that? No, I did not. It's just that she might need a while to adjust and figure out that it's real, not just some line you're using."

Kosar gave her a hard look. Humans could be so confusing sometimes. With a dragon it would be easy, they'd both feel the pull of fate and know what it meant. But he knew that Davenport was right, and that Ashley might not understand what was between them. He had to give his mate time to relax, to find her own way to accept the truth the universe had put in front of the two of them.

It was the most difficult task he'd set himself in his years of service to the Dragon Throne. Even learning the secrets of the accursed stardrive seemed easier. But it didn't matter how hard the task was, for Ashley's sake he'd do it. He'd give her the space she needed, and he'd show her that he was sincere. If the males of her own species made her distrustful, then he'd prove himself better than them — whatever it took.

Grabbing another beer, he took a deep drink and then nodded to Davenport. "Thank you for your help," he told her, rising to his feet and spreading his wings. Pain shot through him at the motion and he staggered, taken by surprise. The pain must have shown on his face because the sergeant was on her feet trying to help him.

"I'm fine," he said, waving her off. She looked at him dubiously.

"You don't look fine," she pointed out. "You're in pain. Should go back to the doctors."

"They don't know any more about this than I do," he complained. "They'll want me locked up and under observation, and I don't have the time for that."

Davenport grimaced but didn't argue. They both knew it was true. "Promise me you're taking it easy, then. If we can't spare the time for you to get examined, we can't spare the time for you to recover if you push yourself too hard."

"It's nothing, just some pain in my wings," Kosar grumbled, then relented. Why have a deputy if he wasn't going to listen to her advice? "Okay. I'll rest my wings, I promise. Now can I go?"

Davenport shook her head.

"There's one other thing we need to talk about," she said quietly. "I think someone's been taking data from the Center."

That brought Kosar up short, and he blinked as he readjusted. "Why didn't you start with that? For that matter, why didn't you bring it up in the security office?"

"Because I'm not sure who's doing it, and I don't know if the office is secure," Davenport said slowly. Looking around Barsoom, Kosar knew she had a point. The bar was busy enough and noisy enough that no one would be able to overhear them here. A bug planted in the office could tip off whoever was behind the theft, and they had to be careful.

"What have you seen?" he asked, sinking back into his chair.

"Nothing conclusive, but the quantum communications laboratory reported some odd results and I've been looking at them," Davenport said quietly. "The best I can work out is that a working quantum communicator inside the Center is interfering with their experiments."

Kosar felt his jaw tighten and his dragon rage rise. The human quantum communicators were rare and expensive pieces of technology manufactured by LakeTech, one of the largest human corporations on Mars. They were used for communications between executives, and sometimes their bodyguards. There was no reason for one to be in the Center.

Whoever had brought one in without telling him had to be a spy. And one with a lot of resources behind them to get hold of such an expensive piece of technology. That was a bad sign, especially since it was almost impossible to detect one quantum communicator without another. The Center had recently started trying to reconstruct the more powerful dragon empire version of the technology, a system that had once linked planets across the gulf of space. Without those experiments they'd never have known about the spy.

Hell, if Davenport hadn't been paying attention, they still wouldn't have noticed anything.

"Can you pin it down? Find out where it's coming from, who's using it?" he asked. Davenport's headshake was no surprise.

"Sorry, boss. Not without a lot more data."

Growling, Kosar carefully put down his glass. Gathering more data meant waiting for whoever it was to send more messages, and that was dangerous. The only comfort he had was that the thieves couldn't get hold of anything too bad. Oh, there were valuable secrets, but none that would break a world open. Not yet.

But now Ashley was making progress with the mysteries of the stardrive. Sooner or later, Kosar was sure, she'd crack the problem — and that would mean a secret that they couldn't afford to see fall into the hands of the unprepared humans.

Perhaps I'm being too hard on them, he thought. They've come a long way since the knights in armor that I'm used to.

But while it was true that they'd advanced to the point of getting into space on their own, the humans had also wrecked their home planet pretty badly getting there. Kosar didn't trust them to keep a new and dangerous technology safe, and he knew that the Emperor didn't either. I'm in charge of keeping the stardrive safe, and I will not fail in my mission.

"Careful, boss," Davenport said, and Kosar looked down to see his hands were crushing the metal armrests of the chair he sat in. Sighing, he forced himself to let go and wondered how much he'd have to pay to replace the chair. At least it was a change from having to replace a broken glass.

"I'm not going to let whoever this is steal my mate's research," he said. "Not going to happen. We have to track down that transmitter or stop it."

Davenport snorted at that. "Sure. I'll just tell the quantum researchers that they have to break the laws of physics faster, they'll be perfectly happy to do comply."

Kosar glared at his second in command, but he couldn't argue with her. The researchers were working as fast as they could to make their breakthrough, and nothing either of them could do would speed them up. He sighed.

"Then we'll just have to track down the spy the old-fashioned way," he said. While a quick solution would be best, he couldn't deny that the idea of a hunt pleased him. Being around Ashley constantly was frustrating when she didn't acknowledge that she was his mate, and if he found the spies he'd have someone to take that out on. The only question was where to start his search.