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Disappearing Act


TO ESCAPE PURSUIT, SHE TOOK ON ANOTHERS IDENTITY
AND FOUND HERSELF MARKED FOR DEATH!

Mariss work with the local underworld on the huge space station was anything but honest, but life was much more pleasant than it had been before the gangs leader had picked her up from the slums. Then her boss grabbed a visitor to the station who was asking too many questions, only to find out that she was a very important diplomat. Worse, his prisoner had apparently committed suicide by jumping through an airlock into hard vacuum.

To avoid dangerous questions from station security, he decided to let Mariss corpse be found with the diplomats IDs; but Maris saw through his plot and used those IDs to escape to the planet the Diplomat was about to investigate. Unfortunatley she landed in a hornets nest of corrupt officials conspiring with a local tyrant. Surrounded by people who wanted her eliminated, the only person she could trust was Gabrel, a young officer who set off with her on a cross-planet trek to get evidence that would expose the tangled web of corruption.

Maris was strongly attracted to Gabrel and the feeling seemed to be mutual. But then, he thought she was a high-ranking government agent. What would happen when he found that she was only a petty criminal on the run?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Margaret Ball is author of such popular fantasy novels as The Shadow Gate, No Earthly Sunne, and Lost in Translation, and in the science fiction field has collaborated with New York Times best-selling author Anne McCaffrey on the national best sellers PartnerShip (Baen), recently reprinted in the Baen MegaBook Brain Ships, and Acorna: The Unicorn Girl and Acornas Quest (both Harper Prism/Eos). She has also written historical novels and romances under her own name, as well as pseudonyms (for example, Catherine Lyndell). Ball has degrees in mathematics and linguistics, and was a Fulbright Scholar, spending two years in Africa studying Swahili. She has two daughters and does quilting in her spare time.

Illustration by Bob Eggleton


ORDER Hardcover

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

First printing, October 2004

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ball, Margaret, 1947-

Disappearing act / Margaret Ball.
p. cm.
"A Baen Books Original"T.p. verso.
ISBN 0-7434-8853-9 (hc)
1. Life on other planetsFiction. 2. Political corruptionFiction. 3. Space stationsFiction. 4. WomenFiction. I. Title.

PS3552.A45535D57 2004
813'.54dc22
2004013801

ISBN: 0-7434-8853-9

Copyright 2004 by Margaret Ball

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
https://www.baen.com

Production by Windhaven Press
Auburn, NH

Electronic version by Baen Books
https://www.baen.com


BAEN BOOKS by MARGARET BALL

Disappearing Act

Brain Ships
Omnibus with Anne McCaffrey and with Mercedes Lackey)
Mathemagics
The Shadow Gate

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