TO ESCAPE PURSUIT, SHE TOOK ON ANOTHER'S IDENTITY—
AND FOUND HERSELF MARKED FOR DEATH!

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. 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 Maris's corpse be found with the diplomat's 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 hornet's 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 Acorna's 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.