Chapter Seven
Alt: Part III

Zane dropped the binoculars from its view of the Astraeus and sighed. "She's been in there too long," he said for the second time.

Allison put a hand on his arm in sympathy. He knew she could relate to what he was going through. This kind of scenario was practically a weekly occurrence with her and Carter. "It hasn't been that long Zane. She'll get it done."

He smiled weakly and then looked at his watch again, noting the extra seconds that had passed. It wasn't like anything seemed out of the ordinary and the shit was probably going to hit the fan any second now. But he thought things would go much quicker than they were. It had been a full five minutes since she'd left. It wasn't that complicated for her to locate the core and set the detonator. There could be many reasons for the delay but he was inclined to think the worst after the day he was having.

And there was also the issue of Grace's disappearance. She hadn't shown up and she still wasn't answering her PDA. When he and Jo had first discussed the situation with her, she confided that Henry had been acting very odd lately, mostly concerning her work on the Astraeus mission. It seemed fairly harmless in the beginning but he had gotten more and more aggressive about it in the last week or so. When she left to go pick up the remote detonator, she hadn't seemed worried about Henry hurting her. Given her delay, he wasn't so sure.

"It hasn't been that long actually," Fargo offered, also trying to alleviate the other man's unease. "I once did a paper in grad school on how humans process time relative to—" Fargo whipped his head around and then turned more fully towards the parking area designated for the security teams and crews working on the ship. "Uh oooh."

Allison and Zane followed his gaze and, even from their distant vantage point, they could make out a familiar jeep racing towards the entrance of the ship.

Zane's eyes widened with panic. "Shit!" He passed the binoculars to Allison and stood to run down the side of the hill. "I knew she needed backup."

Fargo grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back before he could get too far. "What are you doing? You'll get killed down there, if not by Carter then by the explosion."

Zane looked at his friend in disbelief. "Are you serious? I'm not going to just leave her to get busted by Carter. He wanted to kill me this morning. If he's here then he might suspect Jo and he'll kill her too, maybe before she can set off the ionic resonator. I've got to get to her."

Fargo held on to Zane's arm. He could hold his ground when he wanted to it seemed. "If anything does happen, we're going to need you to get out of here. Have some faith in Jo. She'll get herself out of this. She'll—"

"—or she'll get herself killed trying. She said that if we die in here, then we die out there," he said pointing to the hypothetical reality waiting for them if their mission was a success. "She doesn't know he's here and he's going to ambush her. I will not let her die in here."

Allison pulled her PDA sharply from here ear. "She's not answering her phone. Her proximity to the resonator must be jamming the signal." Seeing the two men struggling, she frowned and moved to block Zane's way. "Hey, you're not going down there. Are you going to get yourself killed instead?" Allison shouted at him. "Do you think Jo wants that?" Her eyes softened with worry. "Let her handle this. She knew the risks and she did not want you to be one of them."

Zane glared at the both of them. "Would you be saying the same thing if it was the person you loved in there? If it was Carter or Holly?"

He stopped cold right then as he recalled Holly's fate; the fate that Fargo still had no clue about. That last shot definitely made him feel like an asshole but he was panicking. They hadn't seen what Carter admitted to. They didn't realize how easy it was for these NPCs to brazenly take any of them out without a second thought if they identified them as a threat. "You guys don't understand. I won't let her die in here," he repeated quietly.

"Jo's our friend too," Fargo said defensively. "Friends for longer than you. She'd kick our asses good if we let you go after her." Zane looked back at the shorter man still gripping his arm and also at Allison pleading with him not to put himself in harm's way.

Glancing down the hill, he saw Carter's car stop and watched the man stroll around like he hadn't been beaten and drugged only a couple of hours ago. He turned towards one of the security officers and had a short conversation before climbing up the entrance to the ship.

Tensing up, Zane forcefully ripped his arm from Fargo's grasp. "Too bad none of you get a say in this. Not even her." He didn't spare them another thought as he took off down the hill towards the ship; towards Jo.

For several moments everything was still around Carter and Jo, the two staring at each other silently. Carter had his hands in his pocket obviously waiting for some kind of answer. Jo didn't back away as she gripped the resonator at the entrance to the access panel.

"Something you want to tell me, Jo?" he asked. She just stared at him. Really, what kind of response would be remotely appropriate in the situation?

He stood there expectantly and when it was clear that Jo wasn't in the sharing mood, he continued speaking, hands remaining casually in his pockets. "I'm just asking because I was a little worried. Somehow after we left the woods with Zane, I ended up in the back of my jeep with my hands tied behind my back and that nasty, nauseous feeling you get when someone hits you with a tranquilizer dart."

Jo swallowed roughly. She hated not knowing where he was going with this. Was he genuinely worried about her or was it some kind of bluff? There was something definitely off about him and it did not bode well for her.

Carter tilted his head, scrutinizing her as he explained himself. "There was no sign of you or Zane so I thought the worst, of course. He was on to what we're doing here and even though it seemed unlikely, I was afraid he had some backup in taking us out. I called Henry and he didn't know anything at the time but I found out a little while ago that he caught Grace sneaking around the garage looking for a remote detonator." He chuckled, his eyes dancing with a manic light. "He had the crazy idea that some folks around here were trying to make an ionic resonator. I know! Like I said, it's crazy?"

He met her stoic stare with one of his jokey expressions meant to mollify but actually doing the exact opposite.

"But the only place that would do any good would be in the Astraeus. Pretty impressive figuring that one out. So I drive all the way over here expecting another run-in with Zane or Fargo—poor, grieving, heartbroken Fargo," he mocked. "Or maybe it's Allison that's miserable enough to try something so stupid and reckless. But no. Who do I find inside standing by the engine core but my Jo."

Hearing the sinister possessiveness in his voice, Jo controlled her recoil. The gravity of the situation hit her square in the face. This was not the man she'd known for almost five years. He was not even close to the actual Carter.

She'd spent the last couple of hours marveling at how authentic the simulation felt, from how she perceived her environment to the strange yet plausible extrapolation of one possible path for her four years in the future. But looking at this stranger in the body of her best friend and mentor, this world couldn't have felt less real to her.

"And what does my Jo have with her?" he asked rhetorically, oblivious to Jo's disgust. "Well, I'm just the town sheriff but it looks an awful lot like an ionic resonator to me. Isn't that something." By now, the faux-cheerful grin he'd been taunting her with was gone. All that was left was a cool, simmering anger. "So I pat myself on the back for being right from the beginning. It looks like Zane did have backup. And you're not my Jo. You're his Jo," he practically spat out.

Feeling the tension and the danger build, Jo weighed her options. She still had her gun on her and could shoot him but not without shuffling around the ionic resonator that she held with both hands. She noted that he'd somehow secured another gun and it sat in his holster, which was unclipped. She was certainly a better marksman than him but it wasn't a sure thing that she'd get a shot off before him if it came to that. Plus, he was blocking her get-away exit. Ten seconds was not enough time to struggle with him, hope she came out the victor and then clear the explosion zone safely.

The alternative sucked too. There was another route down the hallway behind her. However, it would mean circling back through the crew quarters before meeting up at the sole passageway leading to the front exit of the ship—she had to count on Carter knowing that. Doing that in ten seconds or less was next to impossible, even without leaving behind a crazy, simulated bad guy. She'd also have to factor in Carter giving chase, or worse, retrieving the detonator and somehow destroying it before it could go off and blow up the ship. She wouldn't be surprised if an enhanced Matrix Carter was capable of that, especially if he was in high security alert mode.

The last option was that she could detonate the ionic resonator and do nothing. She didn't want to die and that's what would surely happen if she detonated the bomb without a plan to get out. But what was her situation compared to the twenty other people stuck in this program? They were geniuses and brilliant scientific minds; they were mothers and fathers; many were her friends and one was her lover and so much more if she could work up the courage to embrace it. Thinking of Zane, he'd called her a grunt with a gun; she was a protector by nature. It was a no-brainer, really.

She had to detonate the bomb no matter the consequences to her.

As the seconds ticked by, she gradually swept her gaze over this version of Carter to assess the man in front of her. She paused, narrowed her eyes and nodded slightly as she made her final choice.

"See, it's a funny, funny thing," she began conversationally. He raised his eyebrows in expectation and removed his hands from his pockets to cross his arms. Jo's eyes flashed to his gun and she licked her lips nervously. She looked down at the device in her hand; it was booted up and active, just waiting for her to flip the switch.

Seeing movement from Carter's shooting arm, she shrugged. "Actually, I got nothing."

Jo activated the detonator and threw the ionic resonator into the engine core, barely registering the confusion on Carter's face before her ears rang from the intense explosion of sound.

TBC...

AN: Thanks again for the reviews and alerts. It absolutely keeps me motivated to crank this out, especially when I was on the road and sometimes more inclined to laze away on Netflix rather than work on this. I would have had this done quicker but decided to change directions a bit based on some helpful feedback. But that caused a slew of edits, etc., etc.. Y'all know how it goes. More soon!