"Oh, good god," Axton groaned in half pain, half revelry, "I haven't partied that hard since my unit liberated Hedonista IV."

"We did all warn you about not trying to out drink everyone in Sanctuary," Maya chided, smirking at her incapacitated comrade. She was seated at the Sanctuary Archive holo-table, while Axton was sprawled on the balcony floor, an icepack sitting on his forehead.

"And I told you, it was free drinks until I passed out!" Axton insisted. "What was I supposed to do, say no?"

"Maybe not, but you didn't have to drink everything that got pushed into your hand," Maya retorted. "I'm still pretty sure Salvador got you to drink actual lighter fluid."

"Maya, how can you think that!" Salvador protested, putting on his best 'wounded pride' face. "I'd never make mi hermano drink that swill." A devilish grin crossed his face. "A paint thinner and gasoline cocktail, on the other hand..."

Maya just rolled her eyes and decided not to fight this particular battle any more. "Have you two seen the others? Lilith wants to get this meeting started in a few minutes."

"Krieg should be coming down from the roof anytime, now that it's calmed down a little," Axton said, moving his ice pack from one eye to the other. "Gotta say, for a crazy man, I thought he'd party more."

"I don't think he trusted himself around all that lunacy," Maya replied. "What about Zero? Gaige?"

"...I am telling you, you crazy old lady, this will work!"

"And I am telling you, you puffed up little girl, it will not!"

"It will! A Hecker circuit re-integrator tied into the digistruct matrix will work!"

"That is grossly incompetent, and highly unstable!"

Salvador peered over the balcony, crossed his arms, and grinned. "That'd be everyone else now." He cupped his hands around his mouth. "Come on down, amigo!" he shouted at the hunched figure on the roof. "Time to get busy!"

Axton grimaced and pressed the icepack over both eyes. "Would you kindly shut your mouth?"

Salvador leaned next to Axtron's ear, his grin widening. "OF COURSE, BUDDY! HAPPY TO HELP YOU RECOVER FROM THAT SPLITTING HEADACHE!"

Axton gingerly exposed one eye and glared at Salvador. "I hate you so much."

"Pah! I figured a big bad commando like you could take a little more than that!"

"I can take a lot," Axton grunted, pushing himself into a sitting position, back resting on the balcony wall. "So what's that say about how much fun I had compared to you, if I'm like this and you're still moving?"

"I guess," Salvador replied, plopping down next to him, "that you're getting soft in your old age."

"My old age? You've got ten years on me, grandpa."

"So why am I the one still walking, hermano?"

"Settle that one on your own time," Lilith said, walking in. "We've got some business to discuss."

"Does it have anything to do with them?" Maya asked with a grin, pointing over Lilith's shoulder. The sounds of Tannis and Gaige were getting louder as they grew closer.

"It's got everything to do with them," Mordecai groused, walking and grabbing a seat in the corner. "They haven't stopped arguing in technobabble for the past hour."

Anything else he might have said next was drowned out as Gaige and Tannis walked into briefing room, arguing heatedly. Maya caught a few words of the debate, but not enough to follow the substance of it. They kept half-shouting and talking over each other as Brick and Zero walked in, Krieg swung down from the roof, and everyone settled in for whatever Lilith wanted to discuss.

Lilith half-leaned against, half-sat on the holotable, rubbing at the bridge of her nose in the universal manner of vexed and overstressed people. Finally, when everyone else had made themselves reasonably comfortable, she cleared her throat. "If I could have your attention, girls?"

Tannis and Gaige ignored her and kept arguing.

"Hey!" Lilith half-shouted. "I am talking to you two!"

Gaige had dropped a hand to her hammer, and Tannis was full-on shouting by now.

Lilith shook her head in frustration. "Well, screw this." She unholstered a pistol and fired a shot out the balcony door.

The argument ceased.

"Now that I've got your attention," she started dryly, "we have some plans to make."

"Maybe we can do it without more gunfire over my head?" Axton said. "This ain't my worst hangover, but that can change if we start shooting inside our own base."

"What's this about, Lil?" Maya asked quickly.

"The future," she replied. "With the space station destroyed, now is our best chance to get off planet and start hunting the other vaults."

There was a few seconds pause as they also considered. "Makes sense," Axton said finally, pushing himself off the balcony floor. "Hyperion can't funnel all the incoming and outgoing traffic through that station anymore. Ships can take off from anywhere on the planet now."

"Are we sure it's safe, though?" Maya asked. "Sanctuary still doesn't even have a shield. Hyperion could always come back."

"Let 'em try!" Brick crowed, slamming one fist into his palm.

"We'll blow them back to space again!" Salvador declared.

"I don't think they'll bother," Lilith replied, shaking her head. "They may have made a ton of money off Pandora at first, but Jack was the one driving all the operations here. Now he's dead, his pet projects have failed, and they just lost their final large scale investment here. I can't imagine that the higher-ups are going to keep throwing money at this planet."

"Wouldn't be the first time a multi-planet corporation gave up on Pandora," Axton pointed out. "First Dahl, then Atlas, and now Hyperion. This place is bad news for big investors."

"There's always someone that thinks they can do better than the last guy," Maya cautioned.

"But there isn't any reason to think it'll be soon," Lilith said, "Awakening the Warrior didn't cause anything like the spread of Eridium from the first Vault, so there's no immediate big money this time."

"No to mention what's been going on in the past two months," Mordecai pointed out. "Two major blows to the corporate overlords from the meek little peasants is bound to make anyone else looking at this place a little skittish."

Lilith nodded. "That all means it's our time to act, before word of the other Vaults leaks offworld." She straightened up. "Which brings me to the main point: we need a ship."

There was a moment's silence as the group considered her statement. "Obviously, you're not talking about the type of passenger ships we all arrived in," Maya finally said, her tone speculative.

"Obviously," Lilith agreed. "Those might get us out of the system, but we need something that's ours, that we can take wherever we want."

"Should've stolen something while we were taking out the space station," Salvador commented. "Those pendajos would've had plenty to spare."

"We'd never have gotten one out," Gaige disagreed. She still sounded a little miffed, but at least she wasn't glaring at Tannis anymore. "A station like that keeps its ships on lockdown unless they're about to be flown. And a control freak like Jack would've added even more safeguards, I'd bet on it."

"What about Mr. Torgue?" Brick suggested. "He likes you guys, and he owns a big gun company. He could buy us a ship."

"Torgue's... in a little trouble with his shareholders," Maya said hesitantly. "I'm not sure he actually does have enough money to buy a ship like we're talking about."

"What are we talking about?" Mordecai pointed out. "If we're not too picky, we've got a ship right now."

Lilith sighed in exasperation. "We already talked about that. Sanctuary can barely fly right now, we'd never get it spaceworthy."

"Not after a couple decades of sitting in the ground," Gaige agreed. "Besides, what about all the people that live here? We can't take them with us, and we can't just force them out of their homes so we can take their city treasure hunting."

Mordecai grunted. "When you put it that way, it does sound a little too much like a Hyperion move."

"So what's our option?" Axton asked. "Take a public liner out of the system and try to buy a new ship on some other planet? We've picked up some money during our adventures, but it's not enough to buy something up on the open market. And I know I can't exactly apply for a loan in the 'civilized' galaxy."

Lilith smiled a little. "Actually, Zero gave us an idea."

Most of the heads in the room looked at the silent figure, leaning in the shadows with his arms crossed. "Well, go on, buddy," Axton finally said. "Don't keep us in suspense."

Zero didn't change his pose, just spoke two words. "The Terminus."

Maya looked doubtful. "The H.S.S. Terminus? Professor Nakayama's starship?"

He nodded.

Salvador burst out laughing. "I think something shook loose in that helmet of yours, compadre," he chuckled. "That thing was more busted than a skag after eating a grenade. There's no way we can get it flying."

"Which brings us to the brainiacs' argument," Mordecai said dryly. "They think we can rebuild it."

"You're kidding," Axton snorted. "How do you repair a ship that's broken into thirds?"

"Trying listening more carefully," Tannis snapped. "We're not going to repair that ship. We're going to build a copy of it."

Axton glanced at Zero. "Was this your idea, too?"

To his surprise, Zero nodded again. "Digistruct Peak."

Now there was an even longer silence as the others tried to digest that thought. "Would that actually work?" Maya wondered. "I mean, we've all seen complicated equipment digistructed. We even use the tech for our gear. But can we actually digistruct a four hundred foot long starship?"

"Absolutely," Gaige put in quickly. "There are a few hurdles, though. Right now, Digistruct Peak only makes hardlight constructs. We'd need to use Eridium to make a permanent, physical object."

"Like the gun crates," Maya pointed out.

"Yes, but a lot more of it," Gaige said. "Like, maybe into the tons."

"Tough, but doable," Mordecai put in. "There's no shortage of it. We can probably raid the abandoned Hyperion plants without any real trouble."

"So, there's the matter problem," Gaige went on. "Then there's the actual assembly of a complicated machine like a starship, but that's still workable." Now she was glaring at Tannis again. "If you make sure the emitters stay synched up as the ship is built. And the best way to do that-"

"-is not with Hecker circuits!" Tannis interrupted.

"Yes, it is! They're the only device that can handle all the data streams at once!"

"They are an inelegant, clumsy, brute force approach to digistruct matrix technology, and will not be used in my training ground!" Tannis bristled. "And they blow up!"

"Only if you-"

"GggrrraaAAAAAAAAAHHHH!"

The strangled roar broke off the argument. Krieg had lurched up, buzz axe clenched in his massive paw of a hand. "Enough from the hounds!" he snarled. "They growl and howl, and we're all still chained to ground! Chew through the leash, and then shred the cats!"

Maya blinked. "As crazy and convoluted as that was, he's right." She turned back to the others. "It's a long way to go before we talk about building the ship. To start with, don't we need to scan whatever we want to create?"

"Not, um... not in this case," Tannis stammered, clearly trying to recover her train of thought. "I mean, we'll need a template, but we don't need total deconstruction for ultimate re-materialization."

Brick raised a hand. "Uh... what?"

"We just need the ship schematics," Gaige explained hastily. "If we can pull the specs out of the Terminus computers, we can feed those into Digistruct Peak's mainframe, and then..." she glanced sideways at Tannis, "...assuming we can hammer out the details, construct the ship."

Axton glanced at Brick, smirked, and raised his own hand. "Am I dumb, or does that mean we need to take a trip out to the Terminus?"

"Yes, and yes," Gaige teased.

"Right now?"

Lilith shook her head. "No, we're not in that much of a rush."

"Great. Wake me when we're ready to roll. I'm gonna go throw up and pass out."

"I'll help," Salvador said cheerfully.

[The most interesting thing to me is that there's apparently a whole star system called Hedonista. New chapters to follow once a week.]