Colonel Everett Young: Command After Catastrophe
The wrecked shuttle could not be lifted, and Riley could not be pulled free. A section of the hull had crushed his lower body against the ground. Destiny would soon resume faster-than-light travel, the expedition had no heavy rescue equipment, and Lieutenant Tamara Johansen could offer pain relief but no realistic chance of survival. Riley asked Colonel Everett Young to spare him a slow death. Young sent the others away, remained beside him, and ended his life with his own hands. No standing order covered the decision. No senior commander could approve it. No medical evacuation aircraft was coming. This was what command aboard Destiny had become: choosing among unacceptable outcomes, then living with the one selected.
Everett Young’s record resists the easy categories of heroic commander and failed commander. He repeatedly preserved the crew, accepted risks he would not impose from safety, and provided continuity when every normal institution had collapsed. He also assaulted subordinates, concealed misconduct, allowed personal relationships to cloud judgment, and once abandoned the expedition’s most important scientist on an alien world. The question is not whether Young was flawless. He plainly was not. The question is why people continued to follow him, and why his damaged command remained more useful than the alternatives available aboard Destiny.
Young was a colonel in the United States Air Force and an experienced member of the Stargate Program. He had led an S G team and later commanded Icarus Base, the remote installation built around the planetary power source required to dial the ninth chevron. His professional formation was operational. He understood off-world security, military discipline, evacuation, and the dangerous relationship between scientific experimentation and base defense. General Jack O’Neill later indicated that Young had been his preferred choice to lead the expedition through the ninth-chevron address, although Colonel David Telford held that assignment when Icarus fell. The distinction mattered. Young had prepared to command a supported installation. He had not prepared to govern a stranded community aboard an Ancient ship several billion light-years from Earth.
The Lucian Alliance assault established his authority through action rather than ceremony. Young coordinated the defense, released Master Sergeant Ronald Greer from confinement because the base needed another experienced fighter, ordered the evacuation, helped recover personnel trapped by a collapse, and sent Lieutenant Matthew Scott through the Stargate as the advance element. Young remained until the end, carrying the case that contained the Ancient communication stones before the destruction of Icarus threw him through the wormhole. He arrived badly injured and immediately placed Scott in temporary command. That was a small but revealing decision. Young understood that a commander who could not function still had a duty to establish who would.
When Young recovered, he inherited an organization that did not legally or practically exist before the attack. The survivors included military personnel, scientists, technicians, administrators, political representatives, and civilians who had been visiting the base. They had not volunteered as one crew, trained under one command structure, or agreed upon a long-term mission. Camile Wray represented the International Oversight Advisory and therefore a real civilian authority. Nicholas Rush possessed the deepest knowledge of the Icarus Project and quickly became essential to operating Destiny. Earth could communicate through the Ancient stones, but it could not send food, reinforcements, replacement parts, or a relief commander. Young’s rank provided immediate emergency authority. It did not automatically settle every political question aboard the ship.
His early command style depended on delegation. Scott led gate teams and served as the principal junior officer. Greer organized security and supplied the physical certainty required when orders had to be enforced. Johansen became the senior available medical authority despite never having been selected for that responsibility. Rush, Eli Wallace, Adam Brody, Dale Volker, Lisa Park, and the other scientists tried to interpret systems built for Ancient operators. Young could not repair the air scrubbers or decode the ship’s navigation. His role was to decide which risks the specialists were permitted to take, which resources they could consume, and when incomplete information was sufficient for action. On Destiny, waiting for certainty was usually another way of allowing life support to fail.
The first survival crises rewarded that approach. When the carbon dioxide scrubbers stopped functioning, Young authorized a gate mission to find material capable of restoring them. He sent personnel into an environment they had barely surveyed because the alternative was the death of everyone aboard. When power reserves collapsed, he had to choose how much energy to preserve for life support, communications, and ship systems nobody fully understood. Destiny’s automation frequently knew more than the crew and explained almost nothing. Young therefore commanded inside an intelligence gap. A decision could look reckless until the ship revealed its purpose, or prudent until an Ancient system failed without warning.
The approach toward a star produced one of his strongest early decisions. Destiny appeared to be on a collision course, while the only working shuttle could support just seventeen people. Young selected Scott and Johansen because a surviving group would need a pilot and a medic. The remaining seats were assigned by lottery. Young excluded himself and stayed aboard with the majority who expected to die. He did not know that Destiny intended to recharge inside the star. He simply refused to convert rank into a reserved seat. The lottery was an imperfect answer to a terrible problem, but it preserved enough legitimacy to prevent the ship from becoming a contest between armed personnel and everyone else.
Legitimacy became harder to preserve when the danger came from the crew rather than the ship. Sergeant Spencer’s deteriorating mental state ended in suicide, but the weapon disappeared and was later found concealed in Young’s quarters. Young accepted temporary removal while Wray oversaw an investigation and Scott conducted the search. This was important. The military commander submitted to a civilian process even though he believed he had been framed. A stranded expedition could not survive if every accusation against the colonel was answered with armed loyalty from his subordinates. For a brief period, Young recognized that command required a procedure others considered credible, not merely confidence in his own innocence.
The discovery of the truth produced the worst decision of his career. Rush had found Spencer’s body, moved the weapon, and withheld kino footage proving the death was a suicide. He intended to remove Young from command. Young confronted him during a planetary mission, beat him, and left him behind as Destiny departed. He then lied to the crew about what had happened. No operational necessity justified the abandonment. Rush was manipulative and had attempted to frame a commander for murder, but he was also the expedition’s most capable Ancient-technology specialist. Young transformed personal retaliation into a strategic hazard and gave every civilian critic evidence that military control could become arbitrary violence.
The consequences extended beyond Rush. Hostile aliens recovered him and used information obtained during his captivity to track Destiny. When Rush returned, he and Wray helped organize a civilian attempt to seize portions of the ship. Their actions endangered everyone, but the revolt did not arise from an imaginary grievance. Young had proven that he could make an unwanted person disappear and conceal the decision. He retook control using loyal military personnel, then stopped short of executions or mass punishment. He acknowledged that leaving Rush had been wrong and became more willing to hear Wray’s objections. Destiny never received a formal constitution, but its command gradually became less purely military because Young learned that emergency authority without political restraint would eventually destroy obedience.
His relationship with Rush remained the central command problem. Young controlled armed personnel, discipline, and most operational decisions. Rush controlled knowledge of the ship and often controlled which options the commander could even see. Each man suspected that the other might sacrifice the crew for a private objective. Young believed Rush would risk lives to preserve Destiny’s mission. Rush believed Young would abandon the mission, misuse force, or choose a comforting return plan without understanding the technology. Neither concern was entirely wrong. The ship needed unity of command, but no single person possessed enough knowledge, legitimacy, and trust to provide it.
Young often answered that problem with surveillance and pressure. He used kinos to improve awareness of activity aboard the ship and relied on Eli as a relatively neutral source of technical information. He questioned scientists separately when he believed Rush was concealing data. These measures reflected a real counterintelligence requirement, but they also weakened the command climate. A crew that knew it was being watched became less likely to speak candidly, while a commander expecting conspiracy could interpret disagreement as disloyalty. Destiny was already an enclosed environment with little privacy. Security procedures that might be routine at a classified base became politically explosive when the base was also everyone’s permanent home.
Young’s personal life made that distrust more dangerous. His marriage to Emily had already been damaged by repeated assignments and his tendency to place the mission first. Before the evacuation, he had an affair with Johansen, a junior officer in his chain of command. She later revealed that she was pregnant with his child. The affair was not merely private misconduct once both officers were trapped aboard Destiny. Johansen was the expedition’s principal medical provider, Young was the commanding officer, and every decision involving her could be interpreted through their concealed relationship. The situation compromised trust, hurt Emily, and placed Johansen in an impossible professional position. Catastrophe did not erase Young’s earlier failures. It placed all of them inside the same corridor.
His conflict with Telford carried the same personal and operational mixture. Telford questioned Young’s fitness, maintained contact with Emily, and had access to Earth’s command structure through the communication stones. Young initially treated him as both a rival and a possible threat. Later evidence revealed something worse. The Lucian Alliance had conditioned Telford during an undercover mission and used him to compromise Icarus. Young authorized an extreme interrogation in which the compartment holding Telford’s transferred consciousness was deprived of air, causing a brief clinical death before revival. The procedure broke the conditioning and recovered a valuable officer. It was also a desperate act performed without the safeguards of a normal detention or medical system. Destiny made improvisation unavoidable. It did not make every improvisation comfortable.
The intelligence obtained from Telford warned that the Lucian Alliance had found another naquadria-rich world and intended to dial Destiny. Young prepared for an attack but could not prevent the incoming wormhole. Commander Kiva’s troops boarded, took hostages, and divided the vessel. Young had to negotiate while attempting to preserve military freedom of action. His concern for Johansen, who was among those at risk and carrying his child, was plainly personal as well as professional. Even so, the larger problem remained the survival of the expedition. The fighting ended with the Alliance command structure broken, several people dead, Johansen wounded, and the unborn child lost. Young regained the ship, but the victory deepened every burden he was already carrying.
His treatment of the surviving Alliance personnel showed a more adaptive commander. Executing them would have been unlawful and strategically wasteful. Keeping a large hostile population permanently confined would consume food, guards, and compartment space the expedition did not possess. Young separated the most dangerous prisoners, tested cooperation, and gradually allowed individuals such as Varro to support missions. This did not erase their responsibility for the boarding action. It recognized that Destiny’s circumstances did not permit an endless prisoner-of-war camp. The former attackers became a controlled source of manpower and eventually part of the community they had tried to seize.
Young’s strongest quality was his willingness to remain physically present when command became painful. He went on dangerous missions, entered damaged sections, confronted threats directly, and stayed with Riley when rescue became impossible. That presence built loyalty among the military personnel, especially Scott and Greer. They did not follow because Young always made the correct choice. They followed because he did not order them toward dangers he treated as someone else’s problem. The same instinct could become reckless, since the expedition could not easily replace its commander. Yet on a ship where everyone feared being sacrificed by distant authority, Young’s personal exposure carried real moral weight.
The cost appeared gradually. The loss of Icarus, the collapse of his marriage, the death of his child, Riley’s death, repeated casualties, and constant conflict with Rush pushed Young toward depression and alcohol. He became less attentive, more volatile, and increasingly convinced that every decision would kill someone. This was not simply private grief. It was degradation of command capability. Destiny had no personnel system able to rotate him out, no behavioral-health team, and no experienced replacement with equal standing. Scott could lead tactical operations. Wray could administer and negotiate. Rush could operate the ship. None could immediately combine those functions into a command the whole expedition would accept.
Destiny itself eventually forced the issue. Young began experiencing repeated simulations in which hostile Nakai vessels attacked the ship. He tried different defensive choices, and every scenario ended with Destiny’s destruction. Believing that the visions proved his unfitness, he withdrew and allowed others to consider Scott as the next commander. Scott refused to treat Young’s pain as evidence that he no longer cared. He argued that the burden mattered because a commander who felt nothing would spend lives too easily. Young returned to duty only after accepting that the test had no perfect tactical solution. His task was not to guarantee survival. It was to remain capable of choosing when certainty was impossible.
That recovery changed his relationship with Rush, although it did not produce friendship. Young eventually learned that Rush had broken Destiny’s master code, found the actual bridge, and concealed both achievements. The discovery nearly returned them to violence. Instead, the confrontation forced Rush to reveal the ship’s deeper mission and forced Young to consider that mission as more than one scientist’s obsession. Young did not surrender command to Rush. He required access to the information and insisted that survival decisions remain shared. Their later cooperation was still abrasive, but it became more functional because both men understood that neither could replace the other.
The automated-drone campaign demonstrated the difference. Destiny faced machines that guarded gates, stars, and supply routes without negotiation or fatigue. Young could not solve that threat through command presence alone. He depended on Rush, Eli, and the science team to improve sensors, alter shields, identify command ships, and calculate routes. He depended on Scott, Greer, and mixed teams that now included former Alliance personnel to execute the plans. Young’s contribution was to compare options, authorize risk, and stop fighting for objectives the ship could not afford. Mature command aboard Destiny became less about issuing the cleverest order and more about making several kinds of expertise act together before the next countdown expired.
His record still contains acts that cannot be excused by stress. He assaulted Rush and abandoned him. He concealed the truth from the crew. He allowed jealousy and guilt to shape his conduct with Telford, Emily, and Johansen. He sometimes treated challenges to his authority as threats to survival when they were actually demands for accountability. He drank when the crew required his attention. Military command is not validated simply because subordinates remain alive afterward. Lawful restraint, honesty, and protection from personal retaliation remain obligations in a crisis, perhaps especially in a crisis.
The reason Young endured was that he could recognize some of those failures and alter his behavior. He accepted Wray as a necessary civilian voice. He relied on Johansen’s medical judgment even when the outcome hurt him personally. He developed Scott rather than merely using him as an obedient deputy. He trusted Eli with increasingly consequential work and accepted technical answers that challenged his own preferences. He permitted former enemies to earn limited responsibility. None of this made Destiny democratic, and Young never stopped being a military commander. It did make the expedition less dependent on one man’s temper and more capable of surviving his mistakes.
The contrast with Rush explains Young’s lasting value. Rush saw Destiny’s mission in civilizational terms. The ship might answer a question older than human history, and abandoning that opportunity could be an irreversible loss. Young saw the crew as a moral constituency rather than raw material for the mission. He could accept casualties, but he could not treat them as numbers without consequence. Rush’s perspective protected the purpose of the voyage. Young’s perspective protected the people who had never volunteered for it. Destiny required both, and much of its danger came from the fact that the two forms of responsibility were embodied by men who barely trusted each other.
The final drone blockade reduced command once again to survival arithmetic. Enemy machines covered the gates and recharge points ahead, while accumulated damage and limited supplies made continued combat unsustainable. Eli proposed placing the crew in stasis and sending Destiny on a continuous three-year crossing to the next galaxy. Young accepted the plan, allowed personnel to communicate with Earth, and supervised the suspension of the expedition. When one pod failed, he was prepared to remain awake rather than trust Rush alone with the final decision. Eli insisted that he had the best chance to repair the chamber. Young listened, accepted the younger man’s judgment, and entered stasis without knowing whether any of them would awaken.
That decision completed the evolution that began at Icarus Base. Young first took command because he was the senior surviving officer and because action under fire made his authority obvious. He remained in command because no rival could combine his operational experience, personal accountability, and willingness to bear consequences. His failures nearly destroyed that legitimacy more than once. His growth came from learning that command did not require him to control every system, silence every critic, or personally solve every crisis. It required him to hold soldiers, civilians, scientists, and former enemies together long enough for their separate abilities to matter.
Colonel Everett Young was not the commander Destiny had been designed to receive. He was the commander catastrophe delivered. His record included courage, coercion, sacrifice, violence, loyalty, grief, and adaptation in uncomfortable proportions. The expedition survived not because he always knew the correct course, but because he continued to make decisions after certainty had disappeared and gradually learned to share authority without abandoning responsibility. After Icarus, command was no longer a position supported by an institution. It was the burden of keeping a damaged community intact while the ship carried all of them farther from home.
