Based on the vid-game series, Mass Effect, developed by BioWare.
Los Azik
Chapter 1
Los Azik was one of those places you wanted to visit, but once you spent a day there you were ready to leave. It had all the bells and whistles of a shiny new car until you learned the cost to maintain it out valued the price. Maybe over forty million aliens lived there, among these being human, asari, volus, krogan, turian, batarian, vorcha, and drell. The hanar were present, but in fewer numbers. There was no telling what inhabited the sewers because evolution continued its blight on the denied and regressed. Above the water tunnels that fed life in and out of the city, alleys seeped with trash and bodies. The latter meandered to and from work or errand, home and debauchery. Los Azik was not without its elegance. Higher in the city's skyscape was the architecture of centuries' worth of refined technology and materials. There were bridges that spanned chasms of city walls and through them sped the traffic of bilinears and sky runners, omnichunnels and private frigates. The main bay of transport and commerce in the center of the city welcomed the combined military, navy, and star force birds of several Council species. To attack Los Azik would have been akin to activating a volcano, everything pouring out of the middle to cover the city around it. It was, in essence, a close second to the Citadel.
There was no sin better than free sin. Along the corridor of Veaubella Boulevard, prostitutes exercised their right to sell their wares. Limbs extended from under warm coats and foreign furs, these men and women lived a better life than pleasure traders on other planets. The cost to fornicate in one of the lavish hotels along the strip consumed a client's credits, but the skills of the pleasure traders brought volus to bankruptcy and krogan to their knees. Anyone with a fortune could afford the upper class courtesans. To keep their service was a greater challenge. The skilled providers could be as prejudiced and sparing as he or she wished, which often lead to the greater sins of jealousy, assault, and sometimes murder. It was not uncommon to find a beautiful woman in a disposal unit, or a lover in rado cuffs being stuffed into the trunk of a sky runner. Even under the neofluorescent lights of the higher cast districts, love and hardship was found to no less of a degree than in the dirge-filled passages of the lower city limits.
In the worm tunnel of a middle class thoroughfare, a human was kicked to death by a gang of batarians for a debt he was unable to pay over a Red Sand addiction. Wife and mother to the human's offspring cowered inside the hovel that was their home, worn hands torn and scarred by life's thorns over the ears of innocence and hopelessness. There would be no dinner tonight for the pair, every last credit and object of value given to the gang by the feeble hands now crushed by boots and clubs. No way to bury the dead in a city made of metal, mother and son would need to leave as soon as the tunnel was clear. To stay any longer would invite the dead eaters, those who scavenged the lost and weak as well as the corpse left to air out in the slum. Furtive glances and scraped hands guided them away from the breathless human, their tears the only thing fresh in their entire stale existence.
There was a war memorial in the middle of the city, a marker for where the first Reaper fell in 2186. Four years later, the destruction had been collected, organized, and reclaimed. Reaper technology existed throughout Los Azik, for it could not simply be thrown away. There was no place to put it. The quality of the technology was also perfected over aeons. Clever minds saw ways to exploit the materials now that there was no potential for indoctrination. Commander Bradyn Shepard had destroyed that capability when she activated the Crucible. Beyond Los Azik's outer defense stations, the relays drifted in space undergoing repair by the strange life forms that maintained them. Since the destructive code Bradyn had enacted to wipe out the Reaper Intelligence and its integrated technology throughout most (if not all) synthetic life, no species had been able to make physical contact with the relays other than to die where they docked. As had been mentioned, the life forms subjugated by the first Reapers and charged with management of the relays became highly active and aggressive. These life forms were all considered Keepers whether or not they resembled the insectoids of the once palatial Citadel. With everything in ruins, it seemed they were programmed with the sole purpose of reconstruction and defense. The Keepers guarded their posts against foreign salvage and repair crews with lethal results.
There was no easy way to jump from system to system those days. Significant, impressively efficient progress had been made with the rebuild after the war, thanks in part to Commander Shepard's uniting every race of alien throughout the Milky Way (the one exception being the yahg due to their aggressive and primitive, albeit intelligent, nature). Old habits died hard, however, as could well be noticed in Los Azik and other places like Omega. The strong prayed on the weak. The vulnerable were exploited. Personal gain meant survival, and each day went by with more minds searching and clinging to shared mindsets once these were discovered. Not to digress, the galaxy had to make ends meet, and point A needed connections with points B, C, and so on. The mass relays inoperable, fleets of the surviving species organized into sovereign supply lines. It was a new age of distribution and transportation, where to trade goods a company or a nation required a navie of highly defensible and heavily armored frigates. Safe and certain travel necessitated the hiring of mercenaries and their ships. A militaristic government could mandate its flight-enabled citizens to serve its needs, with a meager stipend of course. Supply and demand determined the rates for protection and delivery, many taking to free enterprise.