Disappearing Act

Book Description
Maris's 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 gang's 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. Then his prisoner apparently committed suicide by jumping through an airlock into hard vacuum. Since Maris and the missing diplomat had a strong facial resemblance, he decided to let Maris's corpse be found with the diplomat's IDs to avoid a search in his territory. Instead, Maris used the IDs to escape to the planet the Diplomat was about to investigate-and found herself in a hornet's nest of corrupt officials conspiring with a local tyrant in a mysterious scheme. Surrounded by people who wanted her eliminated, the only person she could trust was Gabrel, a young officer who set off on a cross-planet trek with her to get evidence that would expose the web of corruption. Maris was strongly attracted to Gabrel and the feeling seemed to be mutual. Of course, he thought she was a high-ranking government agent; but she was only a petty criminal on the run, and her deception could not be maintained much longer. . . .


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"Borrowing the rich stranger's identity seemed like a good idea at the time. Maris knew nothing about the woman, only that Johnivans, the boss of her gang, had wanted her investigated - and that when she apparently escaped questioning by spacing herself, Johnivans decided to take advantage of the slight physical similarity between Maris and the stranger by planting Maris' prints and retinal scans in the stranger's ID - and to provide Maris as an apparent victim of accidental death, a dead body who would be a dead end to any investigation by the space station's security." "One step ahead of her former protector and would-be assassin, Maris escaped the space station as "Calandra Vissi" - only to discover that as Calandra she was supposed to be one of the Federation's famed Diplos, bionically enhanced with abilities and weapons far beyond the normal human range." "She couldn't pass for a Diplo." "She didn't dare tell the truth and return to the space station." "And somebody on Kalapriya, Calandra's destination world, was trying to kill the Diplo." Gabrel, the young Kalapriyan officer who'd been assigned to escort her, apparently accepted her as a Diplo and was willing to help her escape the assassins. But as they traveled into the unmapped highlands of Kalapriya to unravel the intrigues Calandra had been sent to investigate, how long would her masquerade last - and what would he think of her when he discovered the truth?


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