Gabriel's Redemption Read Online Free PDF

his foot off the table and stood up, unbuttoning his collar. “He’s good, no doubt about that. And he’ll be discrete. But as for his loyalties, I’m concerned he’s too much of a straight arrow for what we need. Not that that outweighs the positives.”
    “Do you think he bought it?” she asked. “He’s sharp, but a bit unstable still about his past. And for Christ’s sake, sir, you pulled him out of a slum in Jamaica. Is he just looking for a way out?”
    “I don’t know. All I know is that he’ll do the mission, and he’ll do it well.” He reached into his inside jacket pocket, withdrawing a cigar. “I know him well enough to be sure about that part.”
    “I know you two have a history,” she said. “But I don’t know what it is. Obviously it’s a strained relationship.”
    MacFarland barked a laugh. “Strained doesn’t begin to describe it. I was captain of the Damocles during the Eden uprising. I’m the one who sent him groundside to root out the terrorists. He holds me personally responsible for his getting his entire team killed due to ‘command errors.’”
    “He was found negligent, it was his fault they failed, his fault eleven soldiers died.”
    He shrugged his shoulders and pulled a lighter from another pocket. “Yes and no. I don’t know if the full story will ever come out, but Gabriel wouldn’t have willingly put his team in such a situation as they ended up in. And he blames me.” He frowned. “Doesn’t matter though. He’s the right man for this job, and there’s a nice carrot waiting at the end for him. He’ll perform.”
    “Do you trust him?” she asked.
    “Not at all,” he said rubbing his chin aimlessly. “But I’ve got a backup plan, in any case. Before you go, get me Santander’s contact information.”
    Gesselli stiffened. “Why him of all people?”  
    MacFarland lit the cigar. “Just do it.”

Chapter 3

    Quentin Santander sat at the hotel lobby bar, his hand on a lowball glass of an amber liquid with a solitary cube of ice floating in it. He swirled the liquid and the cube bumped slowly against the glass edges in the low Mars gravity. The bar was beginning to fill up, miners and office workers getting off shift throughout the dome, looking to spend what little Marscrip they had. Of the many bars in seedy New Cairo, the Bremen Hotel offered the most amount of alcohol for the least amount of money, and the patrons reflected that. Not for the first time, he wondered why he took this assignment on the ass end of humanity. Oh yeah, he remembered. The money.
    “Another tequila, Q?” came a sultry voice from beside him.
    Oh yeah. The women too. He looked to his left, and there was Zeila, as always. She must have just come down from the suite, he thought. He looked into her eyes. No sign of a dew hangover, that’s a relief. She’s a complete mess after one of those trips.
    “Not now,” he replied, looking back at his glass. “I’ve gotta get to work.” He picked the glass up and downed the remaining tequila in one gulp, spitting the ice cube back into the glass and setting it down forcefully on the natural stone bar. Hard enough to break normal glass, he thought. Another reason he hated Mars. Nothing locally produced was breakable. And he needed to break things from time to time. Hell, even his shrink said so.
    “But Q, I just got here,” Zeila said with a pout.
    “Here,” Santander said, throwing a wad of faded red Marscrip notes on the bar. “Enjoy.” He rose from the bar and made his way through the Friday night crowd out of the hotel, leaving Zeila to her evening.

    Outside, he hailed his driver with a quick neuretics ping. He looked up at the dome overhead. Stars were visible to one side, a dust storm blocked the view to the other. Phobos was just rising in the western sky, the glint of the mining station’s solar panels just barely visible. This would be a perfect night in New York, except here there’s no rain, the temperature is the