Ambrose Emerson is one of the most experienced and decorated personnel in Starfleet. With sixty-three years of faithful service, Emerson has been the elder voice-of-experience for five different Starfleet captains. He has been a Command Master Chief for forty-one years, including five years of service as Command Master Chief of Starbase One. He has served on ten different starships (including over twenty years aboard the starship Cheyenne), has fought in twenty-seven different engagements, and possesses numerous medals, service ribbons and commendations. He is typical of the enlisted careerists in Starfleet; single-minded, driven, and, in general, not entirely trusting of officers, the vast majority of whom are younger and less experiance than he is.

Thus far, he has not received a single reprimand on his record, a feat unparalleled in the last century of Starfleet. Having resisted two attempts by the Admiralty to force him into retirement, Emerson is well-known for his working relationship with Captain Juan Holmes of the starship Icarus and his long period of service with Victor Murdock aboard the Cheyenne. His longest period of leave was fourteen weeks in 2321. Since then, he has never taken more than four weeks leave.

Born on December 4th, 2301 to a Starfleet Captain and a civilian biologist, Ambrose Emerson spent the first eight years of his life aboard the starship Majestic, the ship commanded by his father. When his father was killed during a combat engagement with Tholian forces in June of 2309, Emerson and his mother moved back to London, where he was born, and where both his parents were from. His mother got a job teaching biology at the University of Edinborough, and much of his early teenage years were spent commuting from their apartment in Islington to the central-Scottish city. At sixteen, he defied his mother's wishes by enlisting in Starfleet.

Initially trained as a Quartermaster's Mate, Emerson found the work dull, and desired a more responsible position. After serving four years on the starship Cairo, he hoped that his transfer to the Majestic - the same ship that his father had commanded and that he himself had spent the first eight years of his life - would be more eventful. However, when he reenlisted after six years, he chose to be trained instead as a Botswain, a position much more to his liking.

Returning to the Majestic, Emerson spent a further seven years in this new position, before transferring the the USS Agincourt as a Chief Botswain. Eight years later, he was surprised to recieve a promotion to Master Chief Petty Officer and a transfer to the position of Command Master Chief of the newly-commissioned USS Cheyenne.

In mid-2342, Emerson (then forty-one) was on personal leave from his position as the Command Master Chief aboard the starship Cheyenne when he met a Federation Historian by the name of Sayra Davies, then a Professor of History at the University of Bangor, in the Earth country of Wales. There was a brief personal relationship between the two that led to the birth of Emerson's son, Lawrence, in April of 2343. Emerson and Davies remained friends, and for the next fifteen years, he took a two-week leave every six months as often as possible to see his son. In 2358, his son took a year-long internship aboard the Cheyenne, and the two saw each other more frequently, up until Lawrence's entrance into Starfleet Academy in late-2359.

The only member of the Cheyenne's crew to serve onboard as long as Captain Murdock, Emerson joined the crew in 2340, when the ship was under the command of Captain Savel, and remained onboard when Savel was killled and command passed to Murdock. For the next twenty years, Emerson was a consistant figure on the vessel, remaining there until the ship's destruction at K-417. When Murdock moved to Avalon Shipyards, Emerson followed. He found shipyard duties to be boring to him, and, after two years, finally parted ways with the man he had served under for over two decades. He transferred to the newly-commissioned USS Galaxy, and thus became the first Command Master Chief aboard a Galaxy-class starship.

After a five year tenure on the Galaxy, Emerson again chose a stationary life, along with a promotion to the position of Command Master Chief of Starbase One, the second-highest ranked enlisted position in Starfleet. Here he remained until the outbreak of the Dominion War, when he transferred to the starship Ticonderoga, flagship of the Seventh Fleet, so as to be more directly involved in the actual events of the war. The Ticonderoga survived the disastrous Battle of Tyra, in which ninety-eight ships of the Seventh Fleet were destroyed. Emerson himself was wounded in this action, though not seriously.

His son was assigned as chief helm officer the Majestic, the very ship that Emerson had spent the first eight years of his life aboard, along with seven years of his career. During Operation: Return, the action to retake Deep Space Nine from Dominion forces, the Majestic was severely damaged, to the point of being unsalvageable, and most of the crew was killed, including Emerson's son.

Two years later, the former Assistant Chief Helm officer of the Majestic, Juan Holmes (who was to have been the best man at Lawrence Emerson-Davies' wedding), found the ship's hull in a scrapyard and rescued it to use as the basis for a new prototype of escort carrier, the Chamberlain-class. When the Majestic was re-launched under the new name of Chamberlain, she was an entirely new ship, and Ambrose Emerson was aboard her as Command Master Chief, even though this involved a voluntary demotion. When Holmes received command of the larger Icarus, Emerson transferred with him, remaining until May of 2379, when he transferred to the battlecruiser Relentless at the request of Captain Therrien and Fleet Admiral deMercereau (another former member of the Cheyenne's crew), and became Command Master Chief of the Twelfth Fleet.

A good position that Emerson was quite content with, duty aboard the Relentless had one major downside. The ship's intelligence liason is Lieutenant Commander Nelis Saler, the disgraced former captain of the Majestic, who was commanding the ship when Emerson's son was killed. The animosity Emerson feels towards Saler is quite palpable, despite how irrational he knows it to be, and the two did their best to keep the entire ship between them.

Several years later, Emerson decided to finally accept one final promotion, one he had been avoiding for decades. He was approached by his old captain and long-time friend Victor Murdock, long believed to be dead, shortly after the Federation Day incident. Murdock having just been promoted to Commander-in-Chief of Starfleet,, he requested that Emerson finally become Starfleet's senior-most enlisted man. Since it was Murdock requesting the move, Emerson accepted, moving back to Earth and becoming Command Master Chief of the Starfleet Operating Forces.