Still don't own anything, Thanks to BSGsolaria for the review, but its not time to let the cat out of the bag yet.

Chapter 6: Prospecting for Naqueada

Thundersdawn

The modifications to Shunter 1-5-11 took 5 days to complete, 5 days in which the supply of naqueada got lower, low enough to make the SGC contemplate temporarily taking 2 or 3 Prometheus class vessels offline until stocks had built up again.

It wasn't that the SGC didn't know where to find the naqueada, in fact the SGC knew where enough naqueada was to keep three times as many naqueada reactors than they were using running. Trouble was, they could only mine from 3 worlds, the other sources were ever under Gou'auld control, and they weren't going to let a naqueada mine just disappear into SGC's control, or were too close to hostile activity to be safely mined. In at least two cases the locals had refused the SGC mining permission, and conditions at a least four of the naqueada containing planets could best be described as 'hostile', if your definition of hostile includes an acid atmosphere, a planet that would make Venus's 740K (4670C) look colder than the Antarctic, a place with as much atmosphere as the Bronze after the vampires have been dusted, and a planet whose sun was about to go supernova. Strangely enough none of these were considered good mining prospects y the SGC. Which meant searching for new naqueada sources, and an in system source would be a godsend.

"Shunter 1-5-11 you are cleared for priority departure, exit path 5. Be advised your call sign now Prospector, on orders of Captain Peters."

"Prospector acknowledges, priority departure by exit path 5, out"

Prospecting, as any miner, or oil digger will tell you is a very hit or miss business, and even with the latest equipment, a very time-consuming one. That's true on Earth and even more so if you are trying to find the one small ball of rock in the vastness of the solar system which might, not definitely, might contain naqueada in mine-able, or for that matter detectable quantities. Therefore it was of no surprise to the crew of the Prospector that the needles of their naqueada sensors never even twitched during a quick pass over Saturn's belts, so they turned around and began a slow and close pass over the belts in a search pattern. They didn't expect to find anything here, nor in any other of the belt systems. If naqueada was going to be anywhere it would be in the asteroid belt, and it would be weeks before they started searching that.

SGC

"Message from RSS Thundersdawn, General"

Hammond reached out for the message paper, and thanked the airman with a nod, before turning and entering his office. He was late arriving today, and the number of messages already waiting in his in tray was enough to make him wince. He dreaded to think what his email inboxes were like. He made himself a strong coffee before sitting down at his desk, where he read the message from Thundersdawn. Unsurprisingly it was not good news, all the planets with ring systems had been scanned and abandoned, there was no naqueada there. That left the asteroid belt, the most likely source of the naqueada but the most dangerous to search. Prospector would have to enter the largely unmapped asteroid belt in order to be able to search effectively, and run a hugely increased risk of collision. The RSS were certainly the experts in the asteroid belt, they did after all have RSS Coalmine stationed on the belts borders, and were regularly going in to the asteroid belt to snatch and grab asteroids to mine out, but no craft had ever stayed in the asteroid belt anywhere as long as Prospector would have to, and Prospector would be entering areas of the asteroid belt that no-one had any information on, no sensor records, no pictures from Hubble, nothing. That was more dangerous than most of the SG teams missions, excluding, Hammond thought with a wry grin, SG-1's missions. He silently wished Prospector good luck, before moving onto the next message.