I walked down the passage towards the former Blood Fang leader. I could hear his sobs from this end of the passage, though it was difficult to hear the sniffing through Ross’s incessant rambling. I had decided to ignore the man who decided to tell me everything about himself, from his embarrassing baby stories to his recent romantic failures. The only thing that I found even remotely interesting about his life was the fact that his sister was the science type, and that she is involved in some very secretive research. I briefly entertained the thought that she may have been related to the research of Kronos Cells, but the odds of that are remarkably slim.

Nothing interesting happened when we picked the man up. Ross threw him over one shoulder and we walked back, the walk back was filled with more inane rambling from Ross.

As we approached the entrance hall the woman’s voice slowly became audible.

“… Yes Sir. I’ll send a holo of the room, we can get ballistics working on a recreation of the scene as my evidence… She’s willing to negotiate, but she hasn’t stated her political stance… I’ll try find out more in the meanwhile… Understood… Current location is inside the abandoned Stylize auction house, relaying co-ordinates now.”

Finishing her discussion, she began entering numbers on the handheld device. The presence of a handheld communications device was odd in and of itself, it’s standard to use specialised chips embedded into a Digita to allow direct or secretive communication. Curious about the use of such an antique method of communication I asked about it.

“Is that an old radio?”

“Hmm? Oh, this!” she exclaimed while gesturing with the device, “The towers were designed to monitor all Digita signals – direct links and encrypted data included, we are using these old-fashioned radios so they can’t eavesdrop on our communications.”

“Isn’t that an invasion of privacy?” I asked with a tilted head, knowing that people hate ‘invasions of privacy’ despite their intrusive social nature.

She smiled wryly as she said “It is, there’s a huge uproar every decade or so, but nobody has the power to go against the government… This ‘ship’ was built to be a utopia for humanity, but the designers didn’t fully comprehend human nature when they designed certain parts of the ship.”

“Such as the invasive towers?” I asked sarcastically.

She laughed and said “The towers were built later, I’m referring to the districts.”

“Oh?” I said, unsure what that meant.

“Throughout history, humanity has always had a definitive class separation. The privileged always got richer while the commoners got poorer and poorer. This much was particularly true of democracy; from time to time a brilliant monarch would appear and elevate the common living conditions, but democracy has never once given back to the people. Sure, democracy takes much longer to steal from the citizens, but monarchies would be overturned every so often by a people’s hero and the gap would shrink… You would not believe your eyes if you saw how the real upper class citizens of today lived. The problem with the current setup is that nothing goes unseen by the guys at the top, the gap continues to grow since all opposition is thoroughly destroyed before it can do anything.”

She paused to let it sink in a little before driving her point home.

“All the buildings around here are at least five hundred years old and were built to house as many people as possible, practically no maintenance has ever been done either. It’s a fact that humans always have – and always will – live in a class system.”

I decided to sum it up in a single word, “Greed.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

She looked at me flabbergasted, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. It took her a few moments to come to her senses before solemnly nodding her head in agreement.

Over the ages, it had been made apparent that humans were the greediest of the known space-faring races, by a good margin too. The humans never admitted to their greed, but they were known throughout the galaxy as ‘Greedlings’.

Despite their outcries, the galaxy never lets them forget the name. This mockful name started a trend, the Galaxy has assigned a sin to almost every space-faring race, such as Pridelings (Stryfun) and the incredibly ancient Wrathlings (Olgym) – Lust being the only sin excluded from the count.

The Olgym refused to allow the ‘Lustling’ moniker being attached to any known race, they claim it would belong to the Kirea – assuming they decide to show themselves again.

I don’t know much about the Olgym and the Kirea, Nordon only touched on them lightly. All I know is that the Olgym have been around the longest, and that they claim that two came before them; the Kirea and an older forgotten race that was destroyed by the Kirea.

The Kirea still exist however. Nobody has ever seen a Kirean before, but fresh artefacts pop up every so often. Scientists have compared recently found Kirean artefacts with the most ancient Kirean artefacts found and various improvements are evident. Since most newer artefacts have yet to experience decay the consensus is that they are still around. The reason they do not show themselves to the other races is unknown, and the Olgym wholeheartedly refuse to describe their features which only makes finding them harder.

About half the known races have at one point or another tried to politically corner the Olgym into explaining the Kirea, but that information seems to be protected almost religiously. The only information that has been successfully gleamed off the Olgym took the form of a massive monument on their homeworld, the monument portrayed an old Olgym emperor shaking hands with a beautiful elf-like woman with double-pointed ears and reptilian hands and a devilish tail. The monument hints that the Olgym have some sort of relationship with the Kirea but they refused to explain the connection.

“ETD 6 MINUTES!” called the woman, “I want accurate holos of the room before then! Focus on the bullet trails! Get to it!”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Why do you need such accurate recordings of the room?” I asked suspiciously.

She looked at me nervously for a bit before sighing and admitting, “You’ll find out soon enough anyway. The captain wants to know about your combat abilities, he might be planning on including you in the raid of the tower.”

I laughed heartily and exclaimed “Sounds like fun! I look forward to taking the trash these guys serve down a peg!”

She smiled wryly and broke into a cold sweat as I found a wall to lean against as we waited, intentionally taking a stance that showed off my legs.

It wasn’t long before I heard vehicles arriving outside. I unwound my legs with an exaggeratedly graceful motion and walked with a little extra sway in the hips. Having everyone watch me with that look of admiration and desire gave me a fulfilling sense of superiority, especially since the woman were taking eyefuls of their own.

As I neared the transport a man stopped me and asked “You the VIP? Aren’t you supposed to be a gang boss or something?”

His words were dripping with lust and arrogance. The men and women of the evac squad looked at him in horror.

“Yes I am.” I declared confidently, sending him an intimidating glare.

“Hoo, the little whore has guts does she? Come with Me!” he shouted in rage and thrust a hand towards me.

I deflected the hand inwards while drawing a pistol from my waist, releasing the safety and firing into his side in one fluid motion. He fell to the floor – not dead quite yet, a couple of people jumped out of the vehicles to find the source of the sudden gunshot.

Ignoring the noise, I gave a vicious smile as I said “Calling an armed Psion a whore? Quite ballsy of you if I may say so myself.”

Everyone stopped aiming at me and gave the man a pitying glance before turning around and returning to their stations.

He looked up to me hatefully and started screaming “YOU LITTLE BITCH! DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM?!”

“Obviously nobody important if you’re acting like this,” I said cheekily as I stepped closer to him.

“I WILL MAKE YOU PAY FOR THIS YOU LITTLE CUNT!” he screamed, successfully making me royally pissed.

Somehow, a bullet seems like the wrong way to end this.

With a flash of inspiration, I rolled him onto his back with a kick as a cruel smile grew on my face. I then proceeded to thrust my heel down into his eye socket. He stopped thrashing around and a second later his body went limp as death made its claim on him.

I withdrew my heel from his skull and walked up to Ross, asking “Will this cause problems with the higher-ups?”

“I recorded it, so probably not. If we combine this recording with the digital recreation of your earlier battle you should be safe.” Ross said nonchalantly.

“Good. Let’s go.” I said as I boarded the transport.