The penultimate chapter, folks...Thank you again for the feedback! Esp. on Raina. How you've all responded to her is both fascinating and wonderful. Thank you so much for that!

THE SEEKERS
By TIPPER

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CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE LAST of the ROOMS

It took all the reserved energy in the blaster to create a hole large enough for Ronon to crawl through, but it had worked. He hadn't been certain it would, despite Sheppard's story about Larrin melting through a similar door on an Atlantian ship, but damned if it didn't burn right through. He was definitely going to remember this next time any of them said anything to him for shooting at a door.

After that, it was just a matter of reading the story left behind by the dusty footprints of McKay and the woman. Initially, he couldn't understand why it didn't look as if either of them had actually stepped into any of the transporters…until he saw the bloody handprints on three of the sconces. Tapping them together like the ones outside Janus' lab on Atlantis, two of the walls and doors just melted away. Neat.

And for a moment, he had to stop and drink in the sight of all that gold. He'd never seen its like. Stacks and stacks of it, coins, statutes, boxes, bars and plates, chests overflowing with the shimmering metal. It was beautiful.

The first gunshot made him jump, the ricochet echoing around the room like a struck chime. Ashamed at his distraction, he jogged to the edge of the platform and looked down on the scene unfolding down below. Not far from the center of the room, McKay was tackling the woman, trying to get the gun from her; Ronon knew the outcome even before he saw the woman throw McKay off.

He leapt down the stairs, pulling a long knife from the sheath on his back since his blaster was dead, and hit the ground running. Another gunshot rang through the room, and he swore. He couldn't see what had happened as he wound through the stacks of gold. Determined only on avenging what he was sure was the scientist's death, he careened around the final pile and skidded to a stop, surprised to find McKay facing the woman with a gun in his hands, and she sporting an obvious hole in her shoulder.

McKay didn't see him at first, and neither did she, not with her back to Ronon.

When she raised her gun to kill McKay, Ronon didn't even think—the knife thrown with trained accuracy. It hit directly between her shoulder blades, a clean, certain kill.

"How…?" She gurgled, staring at the blood on her fingers from where she'd touched the blade sticking out of her, and collapsed to her knees.

McKay dropped the gun in his hands and jumped forward to catch her…and then tried to save her. Why in the world would he…? Ronon frowned in confusion as McKay bunched the woman's jacket up against the knife wound, trying to stop it from bleeding, telling her to hang on. He shook his head.

"Let her die," Ronon said, not understanding.

McKay looked up then, his eyes widening, as if seeing Ronon for the first time. Shock flashed across his face, then relief and, even more briefly, joy—a tiny quirk of his lips at seeing Ronon alive—and then the woman started to choke on her blood.

Ronon backed away into the shadows as McKay tried to reassure the woman that it would be okay, that she'd be okay. She released the weapon in her hand, and whispered something in return, something that made McKay pale.

And then she stopped breathing, her whole body relaxing in death.

Ronon's eyes narrowed. Good.

McKay lowered her to the floor and visibly started to shake, his arms wrapping around himself. Blood was still pooling under her—too much—seeping into the stones and staining the pieces of gold on the ground.

The scientist looked lost when he finally stood up and backed away from the body, arms still crossed tightly across his chest. Releasing a shuddering breath, he looked up, blinking at Ronon as if he was seeing a ghost.

"Is that really you?"

Ronon arched an eyebrow. "What?"

"How…? I saw you…."

"Followed you," Ronon replied, shrugging. He tilted his head at the bruise creeping over McKay's face, and the bloody nose. "You okay?"

McKay eyes widened, and then gave a short laugh, slightly hysterical. His arms loosened and he grinned stupidly, wiping a hand across his upper lip to clear the mess. "Me? Are you kidding? Look at you! How are you alive? I saw you die! She shot you!"

Ronon frowned. "She just stunned me."

"No, I saw! She took your gun after you used it to fry that panel, nearly blowing us all up. It wasn't on stun, it was on kill. She didn't change it to stun, I know she didn't. She wouldn't know how."

"I changed it to stun after I shot the panel."

"You…" McKay blinked and he wiped the back of his hand over his face, smearing the drying blood. "You changed it to stun?"

"Yeah. I always set it back to stun."

"But…but…" McKay was struggling. "But you didn't…you used to always have it on….Even on Atlantis…. When I was affected by the ascension machine, I had to set it to stun, because you had it set to…."

"Not anymore."

McKay opened his mouth to say something more, but Ronon raised a hand to stop him.

"Sheppard and Teyla," he reminded the scientist.

McKay's eyes widened again, and then he nodded quickly, the expression of someone who was feeling a few steps behind the rest of the world. "Right. Right. Need to, um…" He turned in a circle, patently not looking at the body on the floor, and raked a trembling hand through his hair. "Need to find the heart of this room." He moved then, away from Ronon, winding between two large piles of gold and silver off to one side. Ronon went after him, catching up quickly.

"McKay," he called, grabbing at the scientist's shoulder.

"Yeah?" He sounded tired, beaten. "What?"

"Turn right up there," he pointed at a gap between some stacked gold bricks. "I saw something from up above in that location. Looked like it was deliberately kept clear."

McKay nodded submissively, and followed the direction. Sliding between the gold bricks, he led the way into a small gold walled area that, as Ronon had described, was cleared of any loot. A set of six interlocking rings were set into the floor in a circle and McKay crouched down to look at them. Like passing a hand over a light switch, his body language changed from flustered to focused almost instantaneously.

"Huh," McKay muttered. Ronon stayed out of the way as the scientist rested a hand on the floor, and didn't react when a small console burst out of the floor, similar to the one they found in front of the Gate on Atlantis. McKay, though, had jumped when it appeared so suddenly, but, quickly, he was smiling. Standing, he studied the Ancestral characters scrolling across the top of the pillar, his fingers curling and loosening at his sides as he read.

Ronon reached up and tapped his radio, turning away. "Sheppard. Teyla. You hear me?"

Quietly, almost imperceptibly, he heard Sheppard reply, his words slow. "Barely. Lot of static. You guys okay?"

"Yeah. You?"

"Not so good." The colonel wheezed then, and Ronon frowned at the harshness of it. McKay crouched suddenly next to the pillar, tapping another piece of flooring—and another console shot up out of the ground. Ronon nodded.

"McKay's working on it," he assured Sheppard.

"And the woman?" the colonel asked, sounding like he was yawning.

"No longer a threat."

He heard Sheppard sigh, or perhaps he just breathed a little more heavily into the microphone. "Good. See if you can…" He wheezed. "Can get McKay to work faster, can you? When…" He coughed lightly. "When I say 'not so good', I mean I don't think we have more than minutes in here, and Teyla's out cold."

"Will do."

"Oh, and Ronon?" Sheppard was yawning again.

"Yeah?"

"Tell Rodney that I…." He wheezed a shallow breath. "I managed to pry away some of the floor under this colored line we're standing on. I found something underneath."

"What?"

"Can't be sure, but I think it looks an awful lot like a large version of a machine I saw in Janus' lab. I think…." Another yawn. "I think this might have been one of his facilities once, which answers the question of why even Ancient devices can't find this place. Makes sense that he'd set up something to hide it from both Ancient and Wraith scanners." Sheppard wheezed again, harsh and breathless.

"I'll tell him."

"And Ronon…?"

"Yeah?"

"Glad you and Rodney are okay."

The former Runner smiled. "We'll get you out. Call when we know something."

"Okay. Tell him to hurry. Sheppard out."

Ronon hit the earpiece, frowned, and looked at McKay. The scientist had both hands hovering over the two side by side consoles. He looked like he was waiting for something.

"McKay," Ronon called.

"Mmm?" McKay wasn't paying attention to him anymore.

"Sheppard says he thinks this was one of Janus' hidden labs."

"Yes," the scientist agreed off-handedly. "Already sussed that one with the light sconce trick. Plus, it explains why our Ancient scanners couldn't locate this facility. Tell him he needs to keep up."

Ronon cracked a crooked smile.

"There you are," McKay said suddenly, and started typing something with both hands on each of the pillars. When done, he rested both hands on the surface of each one and they burst to full light, filling the little space they were in. McKay grinned, pleased.

And then the room began to shake. Ronon moved closer to the scientist. McKay was looking up at the ceiling, frowning a little.

A loud crack seemed to cut through the room, and with a deep, angry groan, several of the piles of gold started to shift and shiver. McKay jumped a mile when another crack burst closer to their location, his face filling with dread.

"Oh no," McKay muttered, backing away from the small consoles, his hands raised. They dimmed when he wasn't touching them anymore. "Not good."

"What's happening?" Ronon asked, at the same time that, over the radio, Sheppard asked the same question. Apparently, the whole facility was shaking.

"Janus hid his consoles inside the floors and walls of this room, to make it more difficult for people to access his work," Rodney answered, speaking up to be heard as the rumbling in the room began to grow louder. "I typed the most likely of his passwords into these two small consoles to cause the central consoles and screens to emerge, but the idiots who piled all this gold in here—all this very heavy gold—must have covered them up. The room is trying to respond to my order but….Oh, this is bad….This is very, very bad…."

His words resonated as the carefully stacked piles of gold started breaking and shaking, sliding and shuddering—as the technology buried underneath tried to push them aside. Coins, plates, bars and bricks started cascading down into the gaps between the piles, faster and faster. Larger pieces, statues, arks and filled, heavy chests, started to tumble down off of precarious perches, crashing into the floor below and shaking the whole facility's foundation.

McKay yelled out in pain as a gold brick smacked him on one shoulder, and Ronon dragged him out of the way as more started to fall from the constructed walls boxing in this little space, narrowly missing them both as they crowded closer to the small circular consoles in the middle.

An alarm started blaring, turning both their heads to the far side of the room as a large bolt of electricity arced out of a section of the wall, blasting through several piles and causing an explosion of gold. Sparks and metal melded together in blinding color, and the lights began to flicker. Unveiled screens had appeared, flashing warnings across the walls, ancestral language streaming in red and green and yellow. Ronon couldn't read them, but he knew that sound anywhere.

It was the same sound Atlantis made whenever it was in trouble.

"Do something!" Ronon shouted over the din as another arc of power burst from the wall, closer to them this time. "Turn it off!"

McKay shook his head. "If I can't access the central consoles, I can't free Sheppard and Teyla!"

"You can't do it from here?"

"These don't have what I need! They're just locators! Like the on-switch on a computer. I need—LOOK OUT!"

Ronon twisted as the wall next to him exploded, hit by a massive bolt of energy, showering chunks of metal over him and McKay. The rest of the golden walls weren't far behind; the stacks of bricks really started to break apart around them, the highest blocks crashing into the ground near his feet.

"We have to get out of here!" he shouted, feeling welts and bruises already forming on his skin from being hit. He'd tried to shield McKay, but he knew he couldn't have done a good enough job—the scientist was pressing one arm to his stomach protectively, fingers curled up in pain. Ronon swore, shaking his head. "There's got to be another way!"

"I don't know if….Wait! Look!" Rodney pointed to a different point in the large room, where three large adjacent screens had appeared, information on them brighter and more vivid than elsewhere in the room. "That's it! The central consoles should be over there, under those screens. We just…we need to get to that part of the room." Gold was still crashing down all around them, hitting the floor in great booming waves, deafening. Rodney looked up at Ronon standing over him, hopeful and trusting. "Can we make it?"

Ronon met his gaze with a frown. It was in the opposite direction of the way out. "Is it the only way?"

"To save them? Yes! It's their only chance in the time we have!" You could see it in his eyes. McKay knew what he was asking. But if it was the only way to save Sheppard and Teyla…

Damn.

Electricity coursed overhead, filling the room with light and sparks. The gold was creating a moving floor, piling and rippling like a living thing. The ceiling overhead was splintering with black cracks, like a spider web. The whole room groaned.

Ronon straightened, drawing on all his training and everything he'd lived through in the last eleven years—especially the last four. He had been through wars, had stood on the bridges of ships that were breaking apart, had nearly suffocated on a planet that was about to explode from a supervolcano, had felt the agony of death over and over again….

"Stay right behind me," he ordered sharply, measuring the distance to the spot McKay had pointed to. "And do exactly what I say and do."

McKay just nodded, breathing quickly; he was clearly terrified. "Got it."

Ronon drew in a deep breath, and…"Now!"

And he was running, leaping through the gap in the gold bricks and out onto the moving and shifting floor, his feet skipping across gold coins and jumping over bars. Never taking his eyes off of his goal, he skirted between the piles, slid through narrowing gaps, climbed over gold fragments that could feed whole villages for years….

"Ronon!"

He turned in time to see McKay being brought down under the weight of a cascade of tiny gold bars, the scientist unable to push through, his arms covering his head as he fell to his knees.

In two steps, Ronon was grabbing at the pale raised arms and yanking, throwing McKay forward and past him as if he weighed nothing more than a doll. And then the shower of gold was pummeling his own shoulders and back; heavy weights slammed into his calves and knees, bringing him down….

"No! No, no, no! Ronon, don't—" McKay's shout was lost as something hard and heavy slammed into his head.

And it all went black.

He started awake, surrounded by silence and darkness. He was on the ground, something heavy and massive crushing his legs, and something else tugging roughly at his arms. The ground was heaving below him, shaking and shaking and shaking….

Slowly, sounds began to break through, and the tugging was growing more insistent.

"Come on! Damn it, wake up and come on! Move, move, move! It'll bury you if you don't move!"

He didn't know what the voice meant. What'll bury him? It already felt like a building had fallen on him.

His vision brightened, from dark gray to a hazy red and then, slowly, yellow. Lots of yellow. Gold?

Something pressed hard on his ear, and he flinched, trying to raise an arm to swat the pain away.

"Sheppard! If you can hear me, yell at Ronon to get up! He's not listening to me! He's been knocked silly, but he needs to get up and move before this whole thing comes down on him!"

And, crystal clear inside his ear, a sharp barked order. "Ronon Dex! Get up and move, now! That's an order!"

Ronon blinked, raising his head slightly. "Sheppard?"

"On your feet, soldier! Get up and help McKay! Now!"

The tugging on his arms turned out to be the white, blood-stained grip of Rodney McKay, pulling at him. He blinked some more, and gamely tried to move.

Something incredibly heavy was on his legs.

"Crawl! Push with your feet! I'll pull you!" McKay said, adjusting his grip now that Ronon was looking at him. And he was leaning back, Ronon's hands in his as he used his body weight to tug Ronon out of whatever was pinning him down.

And the weight started to shift. Ronon felt give around his legs, and he started to push, helping McKay.

While around them, the world continued to collapse.

His toes gained some purchase, and he pushed harder, moving forward. Rodney was straining, his neck muscles bulging under his chin as he pulled.

And, suddenly, he was free. Crashing into McKay and sending them rolling, crashing into another stack of gold plates. Rodney didn't stay down long, grabbing at his arm and pulling him upright. "Move!"

Ronon, still disoriented, followed the scientist as McKay dragged him inside a little area of calm inside the shaking room. Three large consoles that resembled the main ones on Atlantis were standing there, half buried in gold. McKay left him propped against the back of one of them as he climbed over the gold and crouched down atop the sea of wealth and started working on one of the consoles, brushing metal off the top of them as he did so.

"Where are you," muttered the scientist. "Where…where….ha!"

McKay's hands moved unbelievably fast, tapping keys and tiles with the expertise that always impressed Ronon, even if he never said it out loud. Ronon remembered now—they had to save Sheppard and Teyla…and themselves. Dust and chunks of ceiling were falling now—there wasn't much time before this whole place came down.

A bolt of energy slammed into the wall just a few feet away, blinding him with sparks, ozone thick in the air.

Behind McKay, the three screens were flashing information at him at an incredible rate, a red pulsing light at the center of each that matched the alarm blaring through the room.

"That…I think that should do it. The rooms should be resetting." McKay looked up at Ronon. "Ask Sheppard if—"

Ronon tapped his earpiece. "Sheppard? McKay says—"

"Tell him it's working!" came the ecstatic reply. Ronon could hear the sound of stone grating against stone, and the ease with which Sheppard was breathing into the mike—a huge change from the harshness of before. "Thank god! With all the shaking….The walls are lifting. Sweet oxygen! Ask him, can we cross the floor without them coming down again?"

Ronon glanced at McKay, who was still working furiously on the console. "Can they walk across the mosaic without the walls coming down?"

"That's what I'm trying to…wait….okay, yes. Tell them to get to the door. Tell them to hurry, I can only keep this thing depressed for so long."

"McKay says go. And run."

"Done," Sheppard grunted then. "Got Teyla over my shoulder. Moving now."

"Tell him to meet us in the sixth room, by the transport chamber to the right of the doorway he walks through," said McKay.

"McKay says, once through the door, wait for us. We'll be there in a second."

McKay frowned at him briefly, not liking the rephrasing, but Ronon didn't care.

"We have to go," he said to the scientist. The other man grimaced, but didn't disagree. McKay tapped a few more keys and leaned back, reluctance clear on his face at having to leave all the information in those consoles behind. When he looked again at Ronon, though, he just nodded.

Ronon pushed away from the console he was leaning against….

And dived forward, pressing down hard on the back of McKay's neck, forcing Rodney to duck as a bolt of energy screamed over their heads and slammed into another gold pile, blowing it into a deadly shower of gold debris. With a tiny shriek of pain, McKay fell away from the consoles, holding the arm he'd been protecting before even closer to his body. Blood was welling between the fingers of the hand holding the arm, a gold knife sticking out of it.

Ronon grabbed him by shoulder of the unhurt arm and tugged. "We have to go! Now!"

Not needing to be told twice, McKay pulled the knife out and scrambled down off the gold he was crouched on, nearly falling to the floor at Ronon's feet. Pulling him upright, Ronon kept one hand on McKay's shirtsleeve and turned to look at what they'd have to navigate in order to get back to the stairs and the platform up above, where the transporter was.

"Oh God, we're gonna die," whispered McKay, his voice bright with fear.

And Ronon couldn't deny it. The ceiling and walls were breaking apart, lined with massive black cracks and breaks, threatening to collapse at any moment. Meanwhile, there was no clear path to the stairs anymore. Whatever paths had existed between the stacks and piles of golden treasure were filled with undulating, shifting metal and rock. It'd be like trying to walk on quicksand….

But there was no other way.

"Stay with me," Ronon said, as much to calm his own underlying fear as McKay's far more obvious terror. "We can do this."

"Okay," Rodney replied shakily, trustingly, imploringly.

A hard shake created a momentary swell, opening up a shallow gap, and Ronon tugged on McKay's sleeve before taking off at a run for the gap. McKay yelped at the suddenness, but Ronon knew the scientist was behind him, could feel his presence right at his back.

He was alternately clambering and sliding, trying to stay ahead of the swells, gold shifting beneath his feet like a pebbly beach. Dust and concrete started to fill the room like a haze, and another bolt of electricity arced through, bright enough to almost blind.

Skidding down a pile, they were suddenly on stone floor again, a small area still clear of gold in the center of the room, near where Ronon had first come across…

Rodney's shout of pain and the loud thud turned Ronon around, to see that the scientist was scrambling to get back on his feet.

He'd tripped over an outstretched arm—the woman's—his feet kicking to get away from it. She was almost completely buried under gold, except for her arm, which McKay had managed to trip over. The hand was curled slightly, almost as if it had reached out and grabbed him as he went past.

"Oh god, oh god, oh god…." McKay's mantra was clearly without awareness, as he stumbled and turned, trying to get his bearings again. And then he froze.

What the…? McKay was staring off to one side, looking into the distance. The gold was moving towards them.

"McKay!' Ronon snapped. "McKay, this way!"

"Look!" The scientist was pointing towards one wall. "Can we get them?"

Ronon turned, and his eyes widened. A portion of the wall had shifted out, and three…three!...ZPMs were visible.

McKay was already heading towards them, his eyes glued on their promise, seeming oblivious to what was happening around him.

"No!" Ronon was next to him in two steps, grabbing at his shirt and turning him. "We have to go! We won't reach them."

"But…" McKay tried to pull away, to head back to where the ZPM's were housed. "But we can't! ZPMs, Ronon! Three! All that power! We have to get them!"

Was he insane? "We'll come back! This place is coming—"

"I can get them!" And Rodney was free from his grip, turning and already trying to run up a shifting pile of gold, to get to the prize he sought more than anything. "I can…." He was halfway up the pile when it suddenly surged, like a geyser.

McKay screamed as the gold swelled up over his head, falling backwards off the pile.

Ronon had gone after him, was behind him when he fell, catching him as the gold threatened to swallow them both whole like a fifteen foot high breaker. Turning them both around, Ronon urged the other man to run, shoving McKay forward up another pile of gold.

"Move!"

And Rodney tried, he did.

They managed to avoid being crushed by the falling wall of gold, but cresting the next pile, McKay fell, his knees just seeming to give way, and he rolled to the bottom, his head smacking into a massive golden coffin like box.

Out cold.

Ronon swore, landed next to McKay on the shifting golden floor, and picked him up, throwing him over his shoulder like a sack of feed.

And started running again as best he could, even with McKay's weight threatening to bring him down on shaking legs.

Up and down, around and over, stay on your feet, hold on to McKay….

His feet hit the stairs and he almost collapsed in gratitude.

Except that the stairs were shaking as violently as the rest of the room. Cracks split the metal, threatening to rend it from the platform up above. No! No, they weren't going to die here!

His quads were burning, his lungs on fire, and the muscles in his back were screaming at the extra weight he was burdened with as he slogged up the metal steps, stepping over cracks and jumping over newly formed gaps. Up, up, up….

"Whoa! You just walked through a wall!"

Ronon looked up, eyes squinting against the sudden change in light—it was suddenly much darker.

Sheppard was staring at him from where he was crouched next to the door Ronon had melted, Teyla at his feet. He stood up, eyes wide with confusion, switching their focus from him to Rodney over his shoulder, to the wall he'd "walked" through.

The colonel opened his mouth to ask the question, but the lights flickering and the floor cracking down the middle forestalled him.

"This way," Ronon ordered, before Sheppard could think again to ask. He ran to the transporter door, and then waited until Sheppard was by his side (Teyla over the colonel's shoulder), before swiping his hand over the control. In a familiar and beautiful sound, the door swished open and Ronon stepped inside, careful not to bang McKay's head, followed quickly by Sheppard and his own burden.

Sheppard just looked at him as the door shut, concerned. "Are you sure this—"

A flash of white.

And they were standing inside a very dull looking cave, with the ground rumbling underneath them. This whole area was unstable.

"We have to get away from here," Ronon said then, already moving towards the sunlight he could see at the end of the tunnel.

"How far?" Sheppard asked, panting a little, following him out into the sun. It was too bright after the darkness of the facility below.

"As far as we can."

He just had to hope that they would make it.

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TBC…

Just one more to go, folks!