The Pure Cold Light Read Online Free

listening after all but wanted nothing.
    Lyell’s glance fell to his hands, but he wore no manacles. Nevertheless, she took him for a prisoner. Having served three months in the penal colony of Corson’s Island, she recognized the unmistakable look—a face that had used up its defensive expressions of self–esteem and denial; body language of a captive overwhelmed by the machinery of justice. The man was darkly handsome—or would have been without the headgear. His blue jumpsuit looked as though he’d slept in it for days—and all at once Lyell realized that she was looking at a Moon colony uniform, and she idly pretended to scratch her elbow, switching on the nose-cam. Maybe the weight-loss gig wouldn’t be a complete failure after all.
    The man in the middle caught her staring at him. He glanced back at her indifferently, then past her, out the lounge doorway, at nothing. He hadn’t killed anyone or he would have been shackled, and probably not allowed to enter inhabited platform areas during layover no matter how much his officers wanted a short one. Something else, then. A mystery…
    Lyell downed the rest of her vodka. The pepper burned lovingly in her throat. She got up and went to the bar. “I’ll have another,” she told Skip.
    The black man beside her made the next step easier. He looked at her and said wryly, “What did you do, jog through the park?”
    Thomasina stared smilingly into his eyes, to tell him how attractive she found him. She let her gaze slide to the one in the middle as if by accident. “You’re out of the Moon colony, aren’t you?” she asked. Peripherally, she saw Skip hesitate and glance up from the drink nozzle.
    The black man nodded, but with a vaguely disquieted look as if he wished now that he’d kept his mouth shut.
    “SC miners, I’ll bet.”
    “Well.” He sipped his drink, caught between the desire to leave and the desire to enjoy what he was paying Geoplatform prices to savor. He tried to ease out of it. “Isn’t everybody?”
    She laughed lightly, which was what he’d wanted. “I just wondered what it was like up there, you know, as compared to down here.” He started to answer but she continued, “I mean, you talk to anybody on the platform here, there isn’t anybody can imagine why colonists would go back to Earth.”
    “Who said we were?” sneered the redhead.
    “Oh, come on. You didn’t come all this way to drink on a company platform.”
    “You’re awfully nosy, lady.”
    She gave a coquettish pout to her expression—it felt so good being able to use her face again—to keep the nearer man in sympathy with her. She would get good sharp closeups of all three of these men. “It’s just that we don’t see many workers on their way down from the Moon to the Earth.”
    “So what are you, the welcome wagon? We’re dropping our friend off. He’s cycled down. People do that.”
    She pretended to study the man in the middle for the first time. “You look like you had an accident.”
    The other two became noticeably more edgy but they needn’t have worried, because the one in the middle said nothing, just stared somewhere out the door.
    “What’s your friend’s name?”
    “Do you mind if we finish our fucking drinks without being bothered by you?” asked the redhead.
    “Hey, lighten up, now,” the man beside her warned him. “Lady, don’t get me wrong, but we’ve got a twenty-minute layover and we’d prefer to relax one little last time before we have to deal with the stink of Philly air again. You see what I’m saying?”
    “But you can’t mean you’re going to my hometown, to Philadelphia? Well, of course you are, you’re with ScumberCorp. You and Mr.—”
    “Rueda, his name’s Angel Rueda,” the redhead blurted out, “and he’s not being talkative today, which is his prerogative. Why don’t you try it yourself?”
    She stiffened indignantly, took her drink, and walked back to her small table. She took her time with the second