Chapter Text
Angel knows, when she starts reforming Hyperion, that this will be no easy feat. “There’s so much to do,” she told Lilith after the initial Helios takeover. “There’s so much to change.” So much, it turns out, is an understatement.
Lilith and the Vault Hunter – Maya, she begins to call her instead – leave a couple of days later. Together they managed to vaporise the first assassination attempt Angel faces: a man from HR, Gerald Johnson, and according to his files, something close to a worshipper of Jack. Lilith tells Angel that after this guy’s ashes were thrown into orbit, nobody else will be willing to risk it.
Angel isn’t so sure.
Scanning Helios’ records is an easy process to speed through using her phaseshift. Angel doesn’t know what this strange internal eridium reaction has done to her, but it’s definitely made her better. She’s more powerful than she ever has been. More powerful than Maya. More powerful than Lilith. But despite this, she can still only process so much, and there’s so much data on Helios that it’s a struggle to know where to start.
The HR team seemed surprised when she didn’t kill them all for Johnson’s betrayal. She holds onto moments like that when she wonders if carrying Hyperion onto a different path is worth it.
Despite everything, she feels like she’s running on borrowed time. Someone will figure out she’s not up for the job. Someone will figure out she’s Jack’s daughter. Someone will figure out she’s little more than a scared girl trying to trick everyone into believing she can be great. And when they do, Angel knows she won’t live long. After all, a week on Helios isn’t nearly enough to change the attitudes of all Hyperion – especially not within the executives.
Management executives, she decided early on, are her worst enemies on this space station. Speaking to them rattles her to her very core – they’re all like Jack, so collected, so charming, so awful. She looks into smiles with polished teeth and she sees the maniacal grins of murderers. How many did you kill for this job, she wants to ask. Do you still think about them? Two executives left peacefully when Angel gave the offer, one of them transferring straight to Maliwan after it turned out she’d been receiving job offers from them this entire time. Another man asked Angel if it were wise to let her go – after all, she could spill all the company secrets to them.
“Secrets about what?” she replied to him. “Weaponry manufacturing? We aren’t in that business anymore.”
This is Angel’s next problem. Shares in the company are plummeting since Jack’s death and Pandora is strangely close to a genuine economic recession. Having spent years with no company but her own, Angel had read plenty about the 900 years of history that led to humans settling on Pandora, and she knew more than most about Earth, the place they’d come from. She knew about economic structures and how they had come about. At one meeting, she said, “For Pandora to go into economic recession, doesn’t it first need a real, functioning economy?” However, she was only met with blank stares. One man piped up to reply, “Pandora has an economy. We make guns. People buy them. What more do you need?”
It was easier for her to let that go than argue it out. But Pandora’s emergency state as Hyperion collapses slowly still remains a priority on Angel’s agenda.
So, while she scans Helios’ internal systems for a spring cleaning, she also finds herself drafting up ideas on what Hyperion can become.
Popular on the list among everyone is a building developer – it likely reminds them all of Opportunity. And while Angel knows she can’t keep stacking on top of the foundation Jack left her to inherit as CEO, perhaps playing into his beloved memory would be enough to push this idea off the ground.
Meanwhile, Research and Development have been given control of Hyperion eridium mines. “Find out what it can do,” Angel instructed. “This element has to be worth more than a weapon.” She’s living proof of this.
The lights are out on the space station when Angel hears a voice from her ECHOcomm. “Yo, Hyperion, it’s me.”
There’s a small smile tugging at the siren’s lips as she sets her pen aside and enhances the ECHO to see Lilith blinking down at her. “You’re on video, Lilith. And I told you not to call me that.”
The holographic screen, created by Angel’s phaseshifting powers, depicts the redhead scrunching up her nose and leaning in closer to the camera. “And I don’t listen to what you’re saying most of the time. It just kinda becomes, blah blah blah, Hyperion is full of jerks, blah blah blah, I suck at self-preservation, yada yada –”
“I what?”
“Kid, I’m hedgin’ my bets that you’re still sat in that stupidly oversized office, working your ass off.”
Angel huffs a laugh, stifling a yawn a moment later against the back of her hand. “I’m not anymore, you distracted me.”
“It is way past your bedtime.”
The CEO can’t even muster up the energy to tell her not to say that, either. Instead, she moves the conversation forward; it’s one they have regularly. “Did you call for something specific, Lilith?”
“Wow, okay, I get the message. And –” There’s a pause. Angel can’t tell from the low quality of the screen, but Lilith seems… uncomfortable. “Yeah, I did. Do I look like the kinda gal that makes social calls in the middle of the night?”
Angel chuckles tiredly, pressing the back of her hand against her mouth to prevent another yawn. “Okay, yeah, fair enough.”
The line falls silent for a moment as Angel waits for Lilith to start talking business, but instead, when the redhead begins to speak, it’s unrelated. “So, up this late, you must be working on somethin’ big.”
Naturally, it catches the CEO off-guard, and she blinks twice before mustering up a reply. “Oh – right. Yeah. I’ve been looking at the Opportunity development and I think Hyperion could genuinely have a future in construction projects. I mean, I’ve been down on Pandora my entire life, and Hyperion facilities are – no offence to Sanctuary, of course – but they’re the only truly well-built facilities on the planet! If we could turn this round, create more – opportunities, so to speak –”
Lilith huffs a laugh at the attempted joke.
“—Then we could set Pandora on course for being a genuinely civilised and hospitable planet. It would be incredible, Lilith.”
Silence fills the cavernous office once again, but only for a moment.
“You sound like you put a lotta thought into this, kid.” Lilith’s voice is strangely flat; nothing near as excited as Angel assumed she would be. “But, uh, there’s something I need to tell you. The Warrior –”
Angel forgot to mention the Warrior before, and cuts in now with renewed interest. “Oh! The Warrior. I didn’t mention, but it would be a hugely important part of the plan. We could use it to – well, not to kill bandits, I’m not Jack, but at least to exercise control over these people until they realise what we’re offering them! It would—”
“You haven’t told her?” The voice comes from off-screen as Angel is interrupted. Roland’s deep tone is different to the relaxed, soothing timbre she normally hears, and as another face comes into sight, she sees the tension in his pressed lips and furrowed brow.
“Haven’t told me what?” the CEO replies, uncertain now, smoothing out the crumpled notes on her desk. She doesn’t remember standing up during her talk with Lilith, but her palms are now pressed against the surface of the desk, leaning on her arms as she looks directly at Roland on the screen.
Lilith sighs. “I was gonna.”
“You were gonna sit there and wait it out until you had an excuse to go and say nothing at all, Lilith.” Whatever’s concerned Roland, it’s putting Angel on edge. They don’t normally talk like this around her. The soldier’s head turns his gaze from Lilith to the ECHOcomm, and he seems… regretful. Pitiful. Angel doesn’t like it. “The Warrior is dead.”
“Roland, come on.”
The CEO feels her blood – or whatever eridium concoction is powering her – run cold. “What,” she asks, faintly, but it’s not a question. She heard Roland perfectly clearly. Grateful for the support her palms offer her against the desk, Angel’s eyes stay fixed widely on the screen before her. “How? Jack said – Jack said the Warrior was godlike, that –”
“Jack didn’t know any of that, Angel. He only ever guessed.” Roland’s voice is now slow, patient, but she doesn’t like it.
A shaky exhale slips through parted lips. “How did this happen? Is there footage? Who did this?”
Sharing a glance, Lilith and Roland look equally uneasy now. “That’s the thing,” Lilith says eventually. “It was shot down by loader bots… sent from Helios.”