I only plan to put my author's notes here before the story for this first one, or if something important needs to be said, like now:

The truth is, I had been asked to adopt this story's sequel once before. But I didn't really want to, but as time went on I decided to take a shot and I asked if the offer still stood. It did, so here we are. I have adopted, well sorta adopted the theme anyway, another of his stories which I'm trying to get back to writing. I lost all my previous files when my laptop got stolen and I just rage-quit for a while when it came to writing. Anyway, I've been wanting to try this one on for size. I love Stargate and I love Battlestar Galactica, and personally I love this section of the site, some good stuff. And now, after talking it over with BIG Z1776 and asking for his permission he let me do this: to go from the beginning with Brutal Truth and work my way to Brutal Reality. I'll be keeping to the theme and characters for the most part, but there's a lot I'll be trying to mold into my own retelling but there's a lot of stuff that I frankly think he got right, and didn't see much point in trying to reinvent the wheel and as a service to him I've kept a lot of it. So long as BIG doesn't put the kibosh in this project, but I think I'll be okay, he's been pretty receptive so far in the initial beta reading. I plan to switch the date from BIG Z's 2014 starting year to 2021. But I will sorta hand-wave the main cast's age in terms of the SG-1 side of things, but there's gonna be the ever-present theme of O'Neill and Landry all working towards retirement and folks like Carter, Mitchell, and Sheppard working their way into overall command, because seriously, who else has the chops for that job? And there's going to be obvious technology differences on top of that, but hopefully I can pull it off. So, hopefully you guys will think so too.

Chapter 1

Location: Battlestar Galactica

Date: September 12, 2021

Time: 1300 Lima

"Lieutenant Adama to the Ready Room, Lieutenant Adama to the Ready Room," the crackly speakers of the Battlestar Galactica droned out rhythmically.

Immediately the call was answered by the young pilot in question. Twenty-year-old Kelsey Adama had been waiting for her first mission for a very long time since being assigned to her father's old Battlestar, the Galactica. She had asked for this assignment so that she could serve under her father just once before he retired. Kelsey wasn't the most intimidating pilot on the Galactica's roster at barely five feet three inches in boots. She had been on the fast track to possibly going into an acting career thanks to her mother's connections in the industry before this, having actually been cast once before in a short-lived local series in her early years and a second more mature series in her middle school years that she did decently in. But this plan had fallen off to the side and now here she was, scrambling from her bunk. Her dark brunette hair was cut just below her shoulders and she was trying to get it back into a bun as she pulled her trousers up her legs. Her thin but curvy frame was a meager hundred pounds without her gear and flight suit. The young pilot scrambled into her flight suit and charged headlong out of her barracks and into the hall where dozens of other crewmembers were milling around, going to and from wherever it was they were supposed to be. Her own rather attractive features, coupled with the platinum highlights in her hair, drew attention as she ran full tilt into the hall.

"Headed somewhere rook?" one of the other pilots said as she charged by him.

"Yep! First mission!" Kelsey replied, throwing the information back to him as she rounded a few more corners.

It didn't take all that long before she was in the Ready Room where her ECO, Lt. Buck "Eyeball" Drew was standing in front of Galactica's CAG, getting briefed.

"Ah, there's the rook, you got here pretty quick Lightbulb," Eyeball called using her call sign (which she hated), smiling as the young officer panted and saluted the CAG.

"Lieutenant Adama reporting as ordered sir!" Kelsey said loudly, snapping off a crisp salute.

"At ease, this your first official mission Lieutenant?"

"Yes sir," Kelsey said.

"Well sorry to tell you this but it's not the high stakes do or die mission you might have been hoping for. We need you to fly your Raptor out to Caprica and pick up a few VIP's for the ceremony."

"What? Babysitting?" Kelsey responded, sounding quite offended.

"Yes, babysitting. Unless you would like me to tell the Commander you're too good for picking up some of his old shipmates from the war?" Captain Spencer responded coolly, the older man giving her a death glare as he did so, cowing Kelsey instantly.

"No sir, um…I just wanted to make sure what it was the mission entailed," Kelsey tried recovering from her outburst and to try and get the threat of her father's disappointment away from her neck.

"Very well Lieutenant, Eyeball here has all the particulars. Head on down to the starboard hanger deck and head out. Dismissed."

Both of them saluted the CAG and filed out, with a very pouty Kelsey Adama in the rear.

"It's not fair, not only do I get a Raptor as my first bird, a frakked up call sign, and my hair looking like a frakking Caprican diva, but my first mission is a gods-damned bus ride?!" the fiery tempered woman spouted off as they descended down into the hanger where they could see their Raptor being prepped and readied by a gang of knuckle draggers. Eyeball just chuckled at the rookie's angry bitching as he opened the door into the hanger deck.

"We ready to go Chief?" Eyeball called out as he began inspecting his bird for himself as was customary.

"Yeah mostly, the fuel injectors into the FTL were acting up a little so we switched them out and ran a diagnostic, nothing to worry about," Chief Tyrol replied, "So where're you taking my bird lieutenant?"

"We're not going that far, just a quick beer-run, want anything?" the older ECO replied as he started climbing up the wing to check his own equipment.

"Well if you're offering I'll take a six-pack of Old Port," the Chief sarcastically replied grinning at Eyeball's normal humor.

"Alright Chief, see ya in a few hours, let's go Lightbulb," the older Lieutenant called over as Kelsey latched her helmet on tightly and hopped the wing into the cabin to get into her seat.

"For frak's sakes stop calling me Lightbulb!" she said, although she knew it was futile, "We good?"

"Yeah we're fine kid let's go."

She grumbled unhappily to herself as she strapped into her seat next to Eyeball who was just humming an odd tune to himself that she was able to hear on her headset. But she didn't bother trying to make him stop, he knew that he was broadcasting that to her and wanted to mess around a bit, as usual. Kelsey began prepping the engines for start-up as their Raptor's unwieldy bulk was towed into the lift and sealed into the airlock. The whole craft shuddered as the powerful lift began to propel them up into the cavernous bay as Kelsey began to warm up the pair of powerful engines on the rear of the Raptor.

She still wasn't happy about going on a milk run but now her training was kicking in as she began to respond coolly and professionally to the Galactica flight officers.

"Raptor two-zero you are cleared for take-off vector zero-five-zero," the radio spoke calmly into their ears.

"Copy Galactica, vector zero-five-zero, beginning take off now."

"Your take off is good two-zero, you cleared for FTL jump. Gods' Speed."

"Thank you Galactica, be back before you know it," Eyeball replied, turning off the comm channel to the outside world and began spinning up the Raptor's FTL drive for their quick trip to Caprica, "Spooling up FTL, plugging in coordinates."

"Make sure you get them right Eyeball, I don't my first mission to end with us smashing into a Caprica City night club," Kelsey said as the experienced ECO carefully plugged in the coordinates.

"Ease up a little Lightbulb, you've got the best ECO in the fleet sitting next to you," he replied with a chuckle.

"I doubt that wise ass."

"Well then, let me prove it kid, coordinates plugged in, we're good to go."

"Finally, let's get this over with. Activating FTL now," Kelsey grumbled as she keyed in the appropriate command that would send the signal to the FTL drive to start drawing in the volatile fuel it needed to make the jump.

Under normal circumstances the drive should have activate instantly, but instead the monitors in the Raptor began buzzing with increased power output from the FTL as the whole bird began to vibrate and buzz. Static electricity began to stand her hair up and make everything metal charge with a shocking charge of electricity.

"Eyeball…why am I not seeing Caprica?" she hissed as she began to toy with the controls irritably.

"I have no idea, hold on let me check something," he replied uncertainly.

"If you're the best ECO in the fleet then Humanity doomed," she kidded him as he sat down and went through the computer checking to see if his suspicions were well founded.

"Our FTL isn't working," he said.

"Oh you don't say!"

Immediately a harsh alarm went off all over the cockpit as red lights began to flash into existence all around the Raptor's numerous flight consoles.

"Oh frak! The FTL's power buffer's failing," Eyeball rapidly said to Kelsey as he typed away, "Back-ups aren't responding, trying to scram the jump," Kelsey saw him trying to stop the jump, usually an easy shut-off switch, but this time when he pulled the lever the man's hand set off a nasty pop of electricity and sent a shower of sparks into the cabin from the control console, and so her ECO went to his backup plan and dropped onto the deck to pull the connections manually and took his helmet off to get his head where he could see the access panel on the bottom of the console. This however set off a different set of chain reactions.

"Eyeball we're spiking! We're overloading the…"

A new shower of sparks flooded from the flight controls as Kelsey looked back at her ECO to verify what it was he was saying. She held her hands up trying to block anything from striking her in the face out of sheer instinct and then a thundering crash resounded behind her and a wall of heat flew from the rear of the cabin. But when the glint of an expanding pool of dark red blood caught her eye she swung into action.

"Eyeball!" she screamed, seeing her ECO flat on the deck where he had been trying to effect their emergency abort sequence, but now she saw smoke rising from his body, the skin black where a connecting arc of electricity had blown through the man's body, with the open access panel now completely blown off and fire being visible inside.

She pulled frantically out of her harness but then a small explosion from a blown circuit breaker sent a small sliver of metal the size of her finger into her thigh. She collapsed to the deck as the piece of red hot steel burned and penetrated the fleshy section of her lower thigh. The agony of the pain was not the worst she'd ever felt before, but it put her on the deck. But her instinct overrode this pain, Eyeball was in dire straits, and crawled over to him.

"Eyeball hang on, you're gonna be okay pal," she yelled as she pulled him out from near the console and ripped his collar off to check his vitals as training told her to do, but when she tried feeling for a pulse she found none and looked down at the blackened face.

All that greeted her were a pair of lifeless unseeing eyes. He was dead. Kelsey dropped him to the deck and backed away, feeling the burning of the metal jabbed in her leg protesting painfully as she did so.

"No…frak!" she screamed in a fit of complete helplessness, slamming a fist onto the deck and grabbed his flightsuit, "Why'd you take your frakking helmet off! Why?!" she said emotionally, then in a flash of clarity remembered her more pressing concerns.

But she still wasn't out of danger, smoke was filling the cabin as she tried to maneuver herself back to where the fire extinguisher was. She yanked the device from its holder, and started to spray at the orange flames under the console. When this only revealed flame licking through the buttons and cooling vents higher-up on the console Kelsey knew this was not a fire she was going to be able to fight. Her leg was still painfully protesting every movement she made, and the wet warm feeling of blood oozing from her wound was now a very unwelcome feeling. She tried peering through the smoke to try and get some manner of control back over her Raptor and managed to grab onto them just as a flash of light unlike anything she had ever seen before enveloped her craft.

"FRAK!" she tried holding her hands over eyes as the light blinded her to anything that might have been able to actually help her.

Another explosion emanated from her console and she felt another piercing pain envelop her shoulder as yet more shrapnel plowed through her thin flight suit. She now heard the unmistakable alarms of altitude loss, and there was only one place that the Raptor would have begun registering that, in a planet's atmosphere. She desperately tried reaching the controls but found shattered shards of metal instead that cut her hands deeply when she slapped her hands onto her flight control console blindly. She had no way of pulling her plummeting craft out of whatever dive or flat spin it was in and just decided on the last resort of any pilot, bail out.

"Come on!" she desperately tried reaching the handle that activated the Raptor's ejector seat for her side of the craft with one hand while he tried to strap in with the other.

Kelsey knew that if she didn't strap into the seat she would be jettisoned, just without a parachute. So she barely managed to clip the straps in and pulled down so hard on the tightening slack of the leather cord that she felt the metal in her shoulder dig ever deeper into her flesh. Blood now covered her arm and left leg, her visor was completely spider webbed with dozens of fractures that would give way and cut her face as well if another piece of shrapnel hit it. With one last energy sapped movement Kelsey reached down, weighed down heavily by negative G-Forces, and finally got a blood covered glove onto the right handle and pulled.

The rush of the jets underneath firing off felt like being lifted by the hands of Zeus as she was propelled out of her doomed air craft and into cold sky. She stopped moving straight up as the rocket motor ran out of fuel and finally quit and by design the sea itself detached from a parachute and survival kit strapped to Kelsey's back. Kelsey felt herself fall into a free dive and desperately pulled the cord for the parachute and was yanked up by the chute's opening and felt a tremendous amount of pain rush through all her wounds and flowed straight to her head.

Frak, some first mission, was the final thought her mind contemplated before she passed out.

Location: Earth Alpha Site at 20,000 Feet Above Sea Level

Time: 1830 Lima

"Holy shit! Look out!" came the very panicked call over the radio channel of Captain Jacob "Crossbow" Nelson's F-302.

"What the Hell was that?" his wingman hollered loudly, banking left along with Lucky as the formation of eight F-302's scattered to avoid the smoking craft that had suddenly appeared on their sensors.

"Okay which of you idiots shot yourself down?" Crossbow ordered over the radio, calling his section to be sure that what he saw wasn't a fellow 302.

"It's not one of ours Captain," one of the other F-302's radioed.

"Okay stay on course, Bat-Two on me, we're following that bogey," Captain Nelson ordered.

"Copy that leader," Bat-Two replied, banking hard right to follow the lead F-302.

The scream of the F-302's thrusters were mere hums behind the buzzing noise of the fighter's inertial dampeners working overtime as the agile aircraft pulled 6 G's pulling in parallel with the trail of smoke from the damaged craft that had scattered their formation. The eight-ship flight was on patrol over the northern spectrum of the Alpha Site with some new rookies from the first F-302 pilots Canada had graduated when all of a sudden a bright flash surprised them all and the entire flight had broken formation to avoid being another pillar of debris and fire descending towards the snow covered ground. It was winter on the planet the Alpha Site was situated and boy it was a long one, five feet of snow had fallen within a few weeks, grounding most patrols and training flights, forcing the Alpha Site's two D9 bulldozers to pull double-duty to shove the unwanted snow and ice off of the runway before the F-302's could take off and land in the same manner they were there to clear out fallen rocks from the cliff-side above the hangar door.

But a routine patrol had quickly turned into a long night of paperwork as the two F-302's followed the trail of smoke to its final conclusive ending point, a crater on the north ridge. But they saw something else as well, a single parachute, descending gently in the direction of the base's runway, which was visible a few miles away and was close enough for the clean-up crews down by the airstrip to see the pilot's chute descending in the clear blue sky.

Three vehicles, a Russian-provided VT-30 Vityaz articulating tracked vehicle and another armored pair of vehicles, British-provided BvS-10 Viking Mk.2 Articulating Armored Personnel Carriers, upgraded with slat cages and gunner protection kits, were already being scrambled from the Alpha Site's garage, one of which had a red cross symbol on the side. Considering what was going on, and how soon it was, it was a fairly impressive turnaround time. Some bright spark had already decided to get the big Russian vehicle out to secure the wreck site to begin operations to salvage the crashed Raptor and the two other vehicles had been sent to rescue the pilot, being the only vehicles that they had one hand that could penetrate the snow-covered forest to where the parachute was projected to land.

"You seeing this skipper?" Bat-two asked as they circled the descending pilot.

"Yeah, interesting, the chute is almost identical to ours but it doesn't look like the pilot's even trying to control it."

"KIA?" the wingman suggested.

"No, I doubt that," Crossbow said as they watched the figure hang limply as the parachute finally touched down not even a mile from the base's runway, "How would they have ejected?"

"Well looks like the base are going to be looking for themselves, are tearing down the pavement."

"Alright, let's follow the chute down, it may not be ours, but that's still a pilot, we follow protocol."

At that the two F-302's banked and formalized their descending pattern around the parachute as it drifted down. Meanwhile their formation was circling further out on high alert, wherever this aircraft had come from others could arrive as well. And these F-302's wanted to be ready.

Location: Earth Alpha Site Infirmary

Time: 2140 Lima

The sound of a constant rhythmic beeping was the first thing that graced Lieutenant Kelsey Adama's ears as she started to stir in a soft hospital bed. She took a few minutes to gain her bearings before she moved her head from side to side. A groggy drug induced headache echoed the sentiment that her chest, shoulder, and leg were feeling at the moment. She felt constricted slightly by what sure to be a heartbeat scanner on her finger and an IV in her arm feeding morpha into her blood stream to dull down the pain that was sure to follow a series of nasty shrapnel wounds across her body. But she knew she was at least alive. There were no real noises except her own breathing and the beeping of a heart monitor.

She finally managed to force her eyelids up and make her eyes to earn their pay after a few minutes of fighting away slight nausea and the ever groggy headache ailing her. What she saw didn't look like any hospital room she'd ever been in, what her eyes were subject to was a basic concrete box. It was littered with an enormous amount of medical gear with a few homey touches like plants, paintings, and a few TV's. But it was nonetheless a box.

"Doctor!" a low serious voice called out from her side.

Kelsey immediately threw her head to see who had just called out and saw that she wasn't alone, in fact she was under guard. A big soldier in a set of multicam fatigues wearing full gear, with a matching helmet with rails on the sides with a headset under it and a night vision mounting point on the front, vest, and pants was standing attentively a few feet to the right of her by a wall where a seat and a table were set up with a few polymer magazines on it. In his hands he held a black assault rifle with attached add-ons such as a flipping combination sight, IR/visible laser emitter, flashlight, and vertical grip. But the model of the weapon was not like anything she'd ever seen in Colonial use, and her eyes immediately went to study him further. There were a couple patches on his sleeve that she couldn't really get a good look at due to how he was facing her. But it immediately became apparent, he wasn't Colonial.

"Oh, decided to return to the land of the living have we?" a woman walked up from the left holding a tablet with a smile on her face. She wore a white coat with a black knee length uniform skirt like any female doctors at military hospitals wore. Her hair was a very dark brown and she wore a thin pair of reading glasses.

"Where am I?" Kelsey immediately snapped, feeling very boxed in as another soldier wearing identical gear walked in behind the Doctor, "Who are you?"

"Well, you are in my infirmary. And as to who I am, I'm Doctor Elizabeth Fox, Chief Medical Officer of the Alpha Site," the woman pleasantly said as she went over a few minor things on her tablet before looking back at Kelsey, "Now, who might you be?"

"Lieutenant Kelsey Adama, Colonial Fleet. Service Number 130-3456-123."

She couldn't help but scowl as even the soldiers smirked at her speaking the way she was. It was no secret that she struck most people as more of a spoiled prissy model than a pilot in the Fleet. But the Doctor seemed to be attentive and listened well.

"Is that all?"

"Which of the Colonies am I on?"

"You're on a planet we call P4X-650, I honestly don't know where your Colonies are, but perhaps if you could tell us more we can help you."

Kelsey narrowed her eyes, sensing something odd going on around here. The soldiers guarding her weren't Colonial, this Doctor was asking for the location of her Home Worlds, and she was saying that they were at a make believe planet called P4X-whatever-whatever. Her overactive mind immediately came to one conclusion, it was a Cylon trick of some kind, it had to be! They had captured her somehow and were milking her for information under the premise of being "aliens" or something along those lines. Kelsey was many things, imaginative was among them. Her lightning-fast imagination went into overdrive, seeing herself on a table, completely unconscious and hooked into some sort of virtual reality trying to fool her into revealing certain things. She crossed her arms and refused to look at the Doctor, and clamped her mouth shut.

"Kelsey? Is everything alright?" the 'Doctor' asked calmly.

"You won't get any information from me, toaster," Kelsey hissed threateningly, forcing an unconscious reaction from the soldiers in the room. One moved his hand to a strange snake-like weapon in a holster while the other kept to the rifle hooked to his chest, the man's finger straightening to hover over the trigger.

The Doctor was a bit thrown off by the rather out-of-the-blue threat from the young woman and put her hand gently on her thigh trying to relax the agitated young pilot, "You don't have to say anything at all to me if you don't want to, but you do need to let me change the bandages from your crash, you took a nasty beating. We had to take more than ten pieces of steel out of you in the past few hours."

"Get your hands off of me!" Kelsey snapped, preparing to strike Dr. Fox.

In an instant the two troopers held their weapons aimed at her face. She stared back at them through angry eyes until she saw what was on the patch she had not been able to see until now. It read: Stargate Command, Earth! Her hands fell onto the bed as she stared, jaw hanging as she studied the words written in the exact same language that she'd grown up reading writing. The symbol of a triangle without its bottom line with the circle above it looked just like a symbol found in an ancient text supposedly describing Earth. The facts now started to come together in her mind, the lack of knowledge of the location of the Colonies, the fact they were human, the odd name of the planet, the subtle differences in the weapons, uniforms and mannerisms. Could it be?

"Are you…from Earth?"