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Setting aside his ire at Casey’s hostile tone, Gardner raised his eyes to the ceiling, a look of mock supplication on his face as he muttered, “Illegitimi non carborundum.”

Samuels suppressed a snicker as he watched Casey fume in silence at the admiral. Evidently the general possessed enough command of nonmilitary neolatinisms to recognize the decidedly post-Roman adage, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

Minister Littlejohn stood and raised her hands, as though trying to ensure that the Starfleet and MACO brass remained in their respective corners and refrained from trying to land any physical blows.

“Okay,” she said. “We know that the NX-class starship is the most advanced design Starfleet currently has.”

“And we have the goddamned Vulcans to thank for that fact, too,” said Admiral Black.

Ignoring the interruption, Littlejohn continued. “But we also know that building the NX is a long and expensive process.” She paused significantly. “Maybe too long and expensive.”

“What are you driving at, Madam Minister?” Black asked.

“Mainly this: I’ve been told that at least three Daedalus-class vessels can be built in the time it takes to put a single NX-class starship into service,” Littlejohn said. “And that’s also a better schedule than we can expect for the newer Intrepid-type design.”

“That’s true,” Black said with a nod. “But we need to build fast ships, even if it takes us a bit longer. Without warp-five capable ships, the troops might as well have to walk to the battlefields.”

“We need quantity, though,” Minister el-Rashid said. “Maybe at least as much as we need quality. Otherwise we’re still placing way too much faith in luck—betting on the chance that our least-numerous but best-equipped ships will just happen to be close to wherever they need to be as this war continues to deepen and broaden.”

Captain Stillwell looked decidedly unhappy, which Samuels found unsurprising. Not only had the captain long been a vocal advocate for the production of high-warp propulsions systems like the Henry Archer warp-five engines that now powered the NX fleet, he was also currently in charge of Starfleet’s cutting-edge warp-seven drive research project, being conducted in conjunction with the Cochrane Institute on Alpha Centauri III.

“As long as we’re still talking about luck,” Stillwell said, “then perhaps we ought to discuss going full-bore into the business of manufacturing our own luck—the way Columbia did.”

“Exactly what are you getting at, Captain?” Samuels asked, hoping that Stillwell wasn’t about to exacerbate his incipient headache.

“Let’s concentrate on quality and quantity both,” the captain said. “We could convert all of our current Daedalus-class production capacity—and that’s a considerable amount of capacity—into NX-class production.”

No such luck on the headache, Samuels thought.

“That’s insane!” Black said. “We’d be betting all of our limited war resources on a still-unproved set of technologies.”

“Unproved?” Stillwell said, his voice rising in both pitch and volume. “Archer’s Enterprise and Hernandez’s Columbia have more than proved the capabilities of the NX design.”

“Which remains Starfleet’s only starship configuration that has shown a consistent vulnerability to Romulan remote-hijack attacks, Captain,” Black said, accentuating his own higher rank.

But Stillwell wasn’t letting go. “Consistent? Admiral, a dataset of two incidents does not make for good empirical research. We’d be upgrading our technology. If we formally consolidate our Daedalus efforts with the NX program, along with all the progress my team has been making lately on the warp-seven project—”

“Your still highly speculative warp-seven project,” Black said, interrupting.

“Admiral, I—”

“All right, let’s save some of this aggression for the Romulans,” Samuels said, shutting down the rapidly overheating discussion. But unlike the present debate, the pressure inside his skull was continuing to build steadily, like the insistent whistle of a teakettle at full boil.