In the second of our stories published in The Sky's the Limit (which, in truth, is really only one half of the entire story), we included a few excerpts from a letter written by the Enterprise's first captain, a man named Thomas Halloway. Here is that letter in its entirety.

Dear Jean-Luc Picard,

I am fully aware that in an organization as large as Starfleet it is impossible for all the officers of a rank to know each other, much less all those that are above and below them. Nevertheless I feel that there is a certain bond between us, and it is that bond that made me sit down tonight and write this letter to you, a man I know only as a name on a personnel file.

I am about to leave the Enterprise, a ship I have come to care about almost like it was a person dear to me, somebody I valued highly and could not live without. It is a lifeless thing, that is true, and yet it is so much more than that. People have called the Galaxy-class ships "travelling cities", and they are not far off the mark. These are the largest spacefaring vehicles created by our civilization so far, large enough—and, more importantly, safe enough—for the crew to bring their families with them.

If their families want to go into space with them, that is. Do not underestimate the importance and influence of one's family, Mr. Picard. I will touch upon that subject again later, but now I believe you will begin to wonder what this letter is about, and who its author is.

As mentioned before, it is impossible for us to know everybody else in the Fleet, so let me introduce myself to you. My full name is Thomas Bhupender Halloway. I was born in 2308's monsoon season; a house birth, according to my mother's wishes. Our family's mansion is located on the outskirts of Pune, in Maharashtra District in India, and I was lucky enough to enjoy the city's marvelous educational facilities for most of my childhood before I decided to leave India – and indeed, the entire planet – behind me and move to Mars. It was a largely spontaneous decision, even though I’m not usually one known to do anything that major without months of planning in advance.

It's Cupid's fault, I guess. There was a girl I fancied, with whom I’d grown up in Pune. Then, when we were fifteen, her family packed their possessions and resettled on the Red Planet because the father had recently been promoted and chosen to take over his company's Mars headquarters. We communicated regularly via subspace, and I sometimes visited her when I had the time. When I was eighteen, I sent an application to Elysium University, since they had one of the best Engineering faculties in the entire solar system. It was done on a whim, and I never expected to be admitted, but then I got the message that I had indeed been chosen, and I simply couldn’t believe my luck.

Of course, this meant leaving behind my family, which wasn't something I was very much looking forward to. I had always been a man who greatly valued his friends and relatives, a man who did not want to be alone longer than necessary. Yet there I was, destined to study at a prestigious university, away from home, away from everybody I knew – except for Ziyi, my childhood friend. It didn't matter that she was living on the other side of the planet; that was only a transport cycle away, after all.

When I told her the news, she was speechless. She was immensely happy that I was coming to Mars, and there was little I could do to keep her from scheduling events to fill every minute of the next six months. I began my education at Elysium, and we grew closer as friends than we'd ever been before. There were times when I hoped for something more, but those were instantly forgotten the moment she introduced me to a friend of hers, a tall, dark-skinned beauty named Solveig Jakobsdottir.

If there is such a thing as love on first sight, this must be it, I thought. Little did I know that we'd go through a phase of not speaking to each other for the better part of two years, due to an incredibly stupid misunderstanding that took the help of two other friends to clear up.

But I digress. Let me come back to my personal life later; right now, I want to tell you how I ended up in Starfleet. It was not my first career choice, to be perfectly honest. All I ever wanted was to be an engineer, and there were enough prospects for a man like me without even taking Starfleet into consideration. For instance, there was the corporation Ziyi's father was working for, a megacomplex that employed a hundred thousand people on Mars alone. Ziyi set up my first traineeship by bullying her father into giving me a chance. That summer that I spent in the headquarters there at the foot of Hecates Tholum was my first real experience of the work that I'd be doing for the better part of my life, and I enjoyed every single moment of it.

Eventually, her father got to know me pretty well, and he began to assign me increasingly challenging tasks, not for any malicious reasons, but because he liked me and wanted me to become as proficient in my line of work as I was ever going to be.

Ziyi's family had grown into one of the most influential on the planet, and her father was a man with connections. Some of those connections led straight to the heart of Starfleet, what with their best known starship construction facility orbiting Mars in an areosynchronous orbit. Before long, I was introduced to a friend of Ziyi's father, the woman in charge of the surface facilities of Utopia Planitia.

She offered me a job. Naturally, I had to finish my studies first, but it was an offer I couldn’t refuse, certainly not without a good reason. And I didn't have one of those. Even if I had had one, I probably would still have taken her up on that offer, mostly because it meant that I would be able to do exactly what I wanted to do for a living, with the proviso that I continue my edution even beyond the point of graduation from Elysium.

I became a civilian expert working under contract for the ASDB, but people kept trying to push me in the direction of Starfleet, and eventually I gave in. I was twenty-eight when I started my courses at the Academy, and before I was thirty, I was done. My previous education came in handy, as did my years of experience working for the Bureau. Ever since I was a boy, I’d been interested in engineering – I used to disassemble broken chronomoters to see how they had worked, and put them back together so that they worked again. I’d planned on being an engineer my entire life. A designer of starships, if I could: what would be more impressive, more significant than creating the machines by which humanity – and I use that word in the broadest sense – had escaped from its limited cradle and spread out amongst the infinite cosmos? What else was there for me to do?

I'm sure you know what people say about making plans. In the end, it's utterly pointless, since life has a habit of turning out completely different from what you expected. In my case, I was eventually promoted to captain, and while I remained an engineer, the new rank meant increased responsibilities for me. Not building parts of ships, but the whole package. That was fine—but it also entailed being responsible for the entire construction process. At the time, I didn't want any of it.

Little did I know what was waiting for me in the yards. There had been talks of constructing a new class of starship, a gigantic space cruiser that would not need to visit a single starbase in over a decade, perhaps even longer. The ASDB branch on Mars took over the design work, and while I wasn't involved heavily at the beginning, things changed as soon as the actual construction of the spaceframe started.

In 2350, I was appointed head of the assembly team, and from then on I got to know the ship from the inside out, and I mean that literally. I've designed and built many machines in the course of my career, but the Enterprise is the one that will always be closest to my heart – as close, that is, as a machine can actually be. I've been able to apply my own personal touch. Granted, the general design was very much finalised before construction even began, but there are variations between the various Galaxy-class ships that came about neither because of mission profiles nor because of crew requirements. If the Enterprise's interior layout is slightly more ... well, organic, I'd like to lay claim to that.

Sadly, the dolphins weren't my idea, but they fit in perfectly. What I did was adding the recreation area by the Cetacean Exchange, as I thought that the crew would welcome an opportunity to just sit and watch the animals do their work.

Back to the subject at hand. You are chosen to take over the ship, by Admiral Satie's expressed wish. Far be it from me to object; after all, it was I who let her down. I could have taken the ship out there, beyond the fringes of known space, and yet I know, deep down inside me, that I would not have enjoyed it even half as much as you are bound to do. As I have said before, I am an engineer at heart, always have been, and the prospect of leaving my work at the yards behind for years, perhaps even decades, of exploration in deep space left me cold, I'm sorry to say. It’s an important job and a great one, I am sure, but it is not my job. It is an honor to have been considered as the captain of the Enterprise, but I know that it’s an honor reserved for someone like you. If there is anything being an engineer has taught me, it’s that there is always a best tool for any job – and that for any tool there is always a perfect job. I know what my perfect job is. It is not command.

The other part of the reason I chose to disappoint Admiral Satie that way was my desire to be with my family. From the beginning, my wife made it very clear that she would not go into space with me, no matter how long I was gone. The Enterprise would’ve had enough space for the crew's families to accompany them on their first mission, but that wasn’t enough of an incentive for my wife, Solveig. She is a public works manager, and there is little call for such a person on a starship in the depths of space. As important as my work in Starfleet has been to me, my wife and my children are more important, they are my everything, so I said goodbye to the Enterprise and all the people on board, knowing full well that I stood a very good chance of never seeing either of them again in my life.

I cannot say that I regret my decision. We found a house on Luna, near Lake Armstrong, that was large enough for us to entertain the thought of having another child, and so we moved there two weeks later. I am sitting in a chair on that house's verandah right now, as a matter of fact, writing this letter to you in accordance with that old Starfleet tradition. It's a charming notion, this unidirectional communication between two captains of the same ship.

My brief perusal of your file tells me that you have yet to form a family of your own – an unfortunate decision, if you pardon me for saying so. I don't claim to know the reasons why you chose to stay alone; indeed, I don't even know if it was your choice at all. Nevertheless, what I want to say is that a man alone is in bad company, as the saying goes. My favorite writer once wrote that "the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack." It doesn't only apply to animals, but also to everybody else. Only in the company of others do we have the chance to fully realize our potential.

Maybe you know these things, maybe you do not. I hope I’m not coming across as patronizing. But as the time for the launch of the Enterprise, with me as her captain, grew closer and closer, I came to realize them for myself. We must all do what it is we are called to do, regardless of what outside factors may be pushing us in other directions. For me, this is engineering – designing and constructing the craft that take us into the void. For you, this is apparently the command of over a thousand men and women, the discovery of new life, the exploration of deep space.

Do not waver on your true path. Follow it, no matter what doubts may plague you. But try not to walk that path alone.

Thomas Halloway