Chapter Text
The hours and days since she’d been hurled back home riding the shockwave of a meteor impact had long-since bled into one. She didn’t know how long she’d been sat there, staring at her simulations.
From the few soil samples she’d taken on Edora in the run-up to that fateful day, she’d already deduced the constituents of the melted ore that must have hardened over its gate into an iris, trapping the Colonel together with the twenty or so Edoran stragglers on the planet. And the only way she knew of getting through such a rocky, naquadah-enriched iris would be to melt it, just as Sokar had tried on their own iris earlier that year.
But such a feat would require generating a heat of at least eight hundred kelvin on the other side via the decay of subatomic particles that were small enough to rematerialize on the other side. And according to her simulations, that was entirely out of the realm of Earth’s current understanding of particle physics.
“Major, it’s been a week already, and I’m not seeing much progress into this particle beam generator you initially proposed.”
The General’s words were true. It had been easy enough to suggest building a particle beam from scratch as soon as she’d had the idea of imitating Sokar’s attack, but the truth of the matter was that building one at the desired scale, capable of the high energies needed, was proving to be a much more significant challenge than she had anticipated.
“Sir, if I may. We’ve already seen with our own eyes that it’s possible. It can be done.”
“I don’t doubt your abilities, Major. But as you know, the Tollan have already offered to fly a ship by the planet in just under eleven months’ time. And I’m also under growing pressure from the Pentagon to have SG-1 put back on mission rota with a stand-in leader until the Colonel’s rescue.”
She couldn’t believe that anyone at the Pentagon could dare think that after everything the Colonel had done for this planet that he could be cast aside and made to wait- assuming he lived that long- stranded on some asteroid-struck planet with little to no supplies. Not when she could, no, would find a way to bring him home well before that.
“I can solve this problem, Sir. I’m sure of it. I need you to give me more time. Please.”