Completion

[Phillip Ellis 0]

Aug. 18, 2154

 

>Begin<

 

The early Martian sunrise loomed across the horizon as Phillip looked out the window of the Utopia Planetia Yards. The day Phillip had been waiting for was finally coming.

 

In just a few short hours he would be finished with the Challenger project. He could rid himself of the responsibility that had befallen on him, and he could go back to Alabama and enjoy normal gravity once more.

 

At some level, he was going to miss the lady he had just barely begun to know. After all when you spend as much time with a ship as Phillip had, you begin to have a relationship with her.

 

But being a shipwright meant that your relationship was cut short when your work on her was done. Phillip had known that for a long time, and had, unlike some of his workers, not built any special ties with the Lady Challenger.

 

Regardless, Phillip wouldn’t be forgetting the experience of building her anytime soon.

 

His workers, much to his and everyone else’s delight were finished their end of the project on Aug. 16, 2154 as expected. He had spent much of yesterday completing the final inspection, and today he would debrief his workers, send them on their merry ways, and turn the project over to Commander Moore.

 

He looked out to iron-rich surface of the planet of war. He had a gut feeling that this was where the future of Earth construction lay. Something he wasn’t sure whether or not to be excited about.

 

By the same token though, he was happy to never be coming back here anytime soon. His leadership of the lighting systems project after the move to Mars orbit had won him notice with more than just the GE top brass.

 

Starfleet, of all people, had taken a liking to Phillip, he told himself it was the Southern charm, but he knew better.

 

Say one thing for this Challenger project, it looked good on the résumé. He had received dozens of messages from Earth corporations with lucrative job offers for his services, and he had turned them all down. In fact he was even offered a foreman job on the Columbia project by GE, but he had turned that down as well.

 

He had initially planned on returning to Alabama and doing nothing but resting for a few months, but Vice-Admiral Colt Monroe changed that plan.

 

Monroe had personally come to ask Phillip to join Starfleet Academy. He had said that, “Ellis you’ve got potential, I won’t lie to you. In 2 months you resurrected a dead part of the program and got it done ahead of schedule.”

 

Monroe continued, “We need people like you in the fleet. Sure you could land about any cushy job in the private sector you wanted right now. But Earth needs people like you.”

 

Phillip didn’t exactly like the idea of going into the military; it wasn’t something that exactly thrilled him, but how could he turn Monroe down?

 

So it was, he had agreed to join Starfleet. Starfleet agreed to give him the rank of Lieutenant and assign him to design unit at Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco. So much for the vacation time.

 

Phillip turned his gaze away from the red surface of Mars and back to the room he had been standing in. His final duties on Challenger were ending, but his journey had just begun.

 

>End<

Edited August 18, 2004 by Phillip Ellis