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Making a slow half turn in her seat, Sato glanced to her right, where Phlox was seated at one of the other tables, which he shared with Commander T’Pol; the Vulcan’s meal was both abstemious and vegetarian, while the Denobulan physician’s was conspicuously neither. But despite their vast differences in both taste and temperament, the sight of the pair dining together wasn’t an uncommon one; they were, after all, the only two nonhumans who served aboard Enterprise.

Sato once again belatedly became aware that her friend had started speaking again. “Okay, I’m reasonably sure you’re not having a stroke or a seizure, Hoshi,” Leydon was saying in an apparent effort to brighten Sato’s all-too-obviously gloomy frame of mind. “But I’m still trying to make sense out of something you said a minute ago.”

“What?” Hoshi said, kicking herself for her bad habit of thinking out loud. It seemed to come with the territory, however, when most of one’s energies were devoted to chopping, grinding, and analyzing words and their underlying ideas.

“That comment you made about the Edsel,” Leydon said around a swallow of iced tea. “I’m still not sure what you were talking about.”

Sato tried to put a brave face on what she had been fretting about for the past couple of hours. “You never heard of the Edsel? I’m surprised at you, with all those stories you have about that ancestor of yours who ran the flight deck of the old wet-navy Enterprise.”

Leydon coughed as the iced tea nearly came back through her nose. “He was only deck crew.”

“Sorry,” Sato said, smiling. “Telling tall tales about your family is your job.”

“Thank you,” Leydon said, coughing into her hand. Setting aside the iced tea, she continued. “My great-grandfather might have only been a skittle on old CVN-65, but he did own a Ford Edsel. Left it to my grandfather, who was still driving the thing until an ECON bomb attack wrecked it during Dubya-Dubya-Three.”

Sato nodded. “So maybe you’re not aware that the Edsel was considered one of the great automotive marketing blunders of its era.”

“I get that. I mean, the Edsel was ugly. Even people back in the mid-twentieth century must have thought so, since nobody wanted to buy ’em. That’s one of the things that made Edsels valuable to collectors decades later. What I don’t get was why you muttered, ‘We’re flying back to Earth in an Edsel’ under your breath a minute ago.”

Sato made an understated please-use-your-inside-voice gesture, spreading both hands just above the tabletop. This close to Enterprise’s keen-eared exec wasn’t the ideal venue for the passing along of scuttlebutt. With her back to T’Pol and Phlox, Sato leaned closer to Leydon and whispered, “I just heard that the NX design is going to be phased out, and soon.”

Leydon looked as though she’d been slapped. “Where’d you hear that?”

“As communications officer on Starfleet’s highest profile NX-class ship, I have a few... inside sources. You’re not going to get more than that out of me without using torture.” Sato wasn’t about to betray the confidence of Sidra Valerian, her counterpart aboard Columbia, or those of several others she knew inside Starfleet Headquarters.

The helmswoman crossed her arms, her gaze squinting through a haze of doubt; Sato didn’t find that surprising, considering how hard her friend had worked to get posted to Enterprise.

“And just what do your ‘inside sources’ say Starfleet intends to replace the NX design with while the Romulans are circling us like sharks?” Leydon said. “A hot-rodded Daedalus?”

Sato was glad her friend wasn’t sipping her drink again just now. “That’s right. One that’s supposed to be capable of making warp five, or can at least sustain a warp four-and-a-half cruising speed. It’s supposed to cut the shipyard manufacturing time by a factor of at least three. But you didn’t hear any of this stuff from me, okay?”

Leydon settled back into her chair and slammed down the rest of her iced tea. A moment later she looked forlornly into the empty glass as though wishing it had held something a good deal stronger.