Read Overload Flux for Free Online Page B

woman with hidden depths.
    “Ten minutes.”
    Her low-pitched, slightly raspy voice brought him back to the present. He’d asked her to give him a countdown at five-minute intervals, in case he got distracted by his talent or violent memories. He hadn’t, but only because he’d been distracted by thinking about her. He gave himself a mental shake to focus on the job at hand.
    “Showtime, I guess.”
    He was still bothered by this meeting. Even if his talent was unpredictable, his intuition was as good as ever, and it was pulsing warning pings.
    They rode the moving stairs to the floor below and threaded through the thinning lunchtime crowd to the prearranged meeting place under the giant clock. It displayed galactic coordinated date and time, local time, and similar data for a dozen popular destination cities on Rekoria and other planets. The murmurs of dozens of languages made a sea of sound. Luka snagged an abandoned tray so he wouldn’t look out of place and found an empty table. Morganthur had already drifted away, making their connection less obvious. The informant knew what he looked like, so all he had to do was wait to be found.
    It didn’t take long. An older, round-faced, olive-skinned woman with gray-streaked black hair, wearing the uniform of a spaceport maintenance worker, slipped into the chair opposite his. She was trying to play it cool, but her eyes darted around too often.
    “Lukasz Foxe?” She mangled the pronunciation of his first name. Most people did.
    When he nodded, she said, “I’m Sandy Green.”
    Almost certainly not her name, but he understood her caution.
    “Call me Luka. Pleased to meet you,” he said, not as warmly as he’d intended. He was liking this situation less and less. It felt like a setup, although he didn’t know who the target was. “I understand you have some data you’re willing to share?”
    Green pushed her hair back behind her ear in a nervous gesture. “Do you work with Balkovsky? He’s who I talked to.”
    “He’s unavailable at the moment.” If she didn’t know Leo was dead, Luka wasn’t going to be the one to tell her. “Your message said you wanted to talk immediately. You’re moving soon?”
    “I’m being transferred,” she said, and her flat tone hinted she wasn’t happy about it. She leaned closer and said more quietly, “Look, Balkovsky promised me a reward if I told him who’s been after Centaurus Transport.”
    Luka showed more surprise than he felt. Greed was so dependable. “This is the first I’ve heard of it. I’d have to run it by the office.”
    “ Carajo , don’t you people even talk to one another?” Green’s expression hardened in annoyance.
    Luka made a placating gesture. “If your information is good, I think we can work something out. How much did you have in mind?”
    She named a figure that raised his eyebrows. Small ocean yachts could be bought for less.
    “I’m the one taking a chance here,” she said defensively. “He’ll kill me if he finds out I’m talking to you.”
    She painted a picture of a man with a grudge because Centaurus Transport’s poor service had cost him his business, his home, and eventually his family. She was saying all the right things, but Luka thought it felt too easy, too believable. On the other hand, it could be true and he could be twisting himself with patterns that didn’t exist. He wasn’t a finder like Leo, able to extrapolate truths from unconnected, random data.
    Hell, this was why he’d resigned his Concordance Command commission and left criminal investigation. Before last year, he could have focused his talent on her to get a sense of whether or not to trust her. Then he’d forced his talent to burn bright to catch a predator. It had nearly cost him his own life, and now he couldn’t make it stop. He could see a lot more and deeper, but once he started, his own thoughts got swamped and he drowned.
    Luka was rocked by a stark memory of Leo, curled like a child in