Gabriel's Redemption Read Online Free PDF Page B

same every day of the year, and it’s too friggin’ sterile. Damn I hate this place , he thought again.
    His Ford Terra limousine pulled up silently, and the rear door opened automatically. He climbed inside, acknowledging his driver with a flick of his hand. “Back to the plant, Colins, where else,” he said. The door closed, shutting out the street noise, and the electric stretch pulled away.
    Just a few minutes down the street, the dome ended and Santander’s car was ushered into the eastbound tube. Very few vehicles out tonight, he noticed. Curfews are working well, he mused as he poured himself another tequila, this time on the company bill.
    The tube’s magnetic field lifted the car a few inches from the roadway and quickly accelerated it up to standard tube speed, 160 miles per hour. Santander only noticed a slight pressure in his chest as the car’s velocity increased. Unfazed, he watched out the window through the car’s glass and tube’s plasteel sections at the darkening plain outside, reflecting sourly on another day in paradise.
    Mars was originally colonized in 2056, ancient history in terms of planetary settlement. After the Luna Project, it was the next step off Mother Earth for humans. It was an exciting time for colonization, and the governments of Earth’s largest countries and multinational corporations poured billions into developing the infrastructure, housing, mining operations, scientific outposts, and so much more. It was always a struggle considering the atmosphere and temperature weren’t conducive to human living, but it was Mars! everyone said. The ultimate goal of space exploration.  
    So the construction continued, the development chugged along, the domes went up, the mines were dug, attempts were made at atmosphere reprocessing, algae was planted to try to warm the climate, and an entire government and economy were created from scratch. The perfect utopia, some called it. Until the discovery of wormholes thirty some-odd years later. From that day forward, Mars became a backwater, a forgotten outpost, a failed experiment.
    The Mars government wavered, asking for help from Earth, but Earth was preoccupied with settling new worlds across the galaxy. Worlds with oceans, land masses, trees, warm nitrogen/oxygen atmospheres. Worlds with futures. And so the Mars society began its slow collapse into chaos. Organized crime ran rampant, but Earth turned away, preferring to let Mars govern itself, as it always wanted to do.  
    Which is where Santander came in.
    The car exited the tube at Pavonis Station in Mars’s third largest domed city, Bradbury. The station pushed the car out of the tube back down onto its wheels, then a rotating platform deposited it onto the main ramp down into the city streets. Colins guided the car towards the entryway for Basalt Boulevard, and the car accelerated into the light traffic flow.

    After just a few minutes, the car reached the far side of the dome structure, and pulled up to the front of a chemical plant. Stacks pierced the dome’s barrier, releasing clouds of steam and byproducts into the Mars atmosphere. The plant wasn’t large by Mars’s standards; it covered just under two acres, and was a typical plasteel and ceramacrete construction.  
    Santander stepped from the car, not bothering to say anything to Colins, and slammed the door behind him, striding up to the plant entrance. The guard outside the main door started to ask for his ID, recognized his leave-me-alone-if-you-know-what’s-good-for-you look, and thought better of it. He opened the door behind him and waved Santander in.  
    Once inside, Santander walked through the entry lobby, past the receptionist, and up to a door marked, “Authorized Personnel Only.” His neuretics threw a code at the door’s system and it swung open for him. Inside, through another door, this one marked “Security”, he finally reached his sparse office. He threw his jacket on the desk and sat down heavily