Excerpts from the The Courtesan Prince

copyright Lynda Williams

ANN

"Second Contact?" Ann repeated, careful not to look too interested. "With Sevolites?"

She was lounging in a deck chair on a patio, doing her usual sexual smolder but this time to no avail. Her recruiter, perched opposite on a chair, might as well have been another piece of furniture.

"Not Sevolites," he said, resenting how she tried to sensationalize everything. "Just ordinary, human Gelacks. And we can't call it First Contact, technically, even though the Old Regime retained so little information the first time."

Ann snorted, shifting a foot forward. "I don't know. I wouldn't call getting our asses kicked out of Killing Reach an information-poor experience."

"If that is, indeed, what happened," he challenged, nettled.

Ann frowned. The recruiter was okay to look at-bit soft in the middle and saggy at the shoulder, but well groomed. All the same he was becoming a bore.

"So this mission," she said, taking a lungful of cigarette smoke in defiance of common civility and a lifetime of health education, "if I take it, I get cut loose?"

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