She grimaced at the thought and set her pistol case and accessory shoulder bag on the counter as the range officer, an absurdly youthful looking Marine master sergeant whose nameplate read "Johannsen, M.," produced ear protectors for her and LaFollet, along with the proper forms. She signed and thumbprinted the paperwork, then opened the shoulder bag for the special ear protectors she'd had made for Nimitz. The 'cat regarded them with scant favor, but he wasn't about to reject them. Back home on Grayson, her outdoor range allowed him to keep an eye on her while she practiced without bringing him into such proximity as to make the sound of the gunshots a problem. Here at the Academy, with its indoor range, that wasn't a possibility, and she watched patiently while he slipped the protectors into place and adjusted them carefully.

"Ready, Stinker?" she asked. The protectors were advanced developments of devices which had been available even before humanity left Old Earth for the stars. They were fully effective at damping the decibel spikes which could injure someone's hearing, yet normal conversational tones were clearly audible through them, and the 'cat raised one true-hand, closed in the sign for the letter "S," and "nodded" it up and down in affirmation.

"Good," she said, and adjusted her own ear protection. LaFollet had already donned his protectors, and she waited patiently while he stepped through the door to give the firing line itself a careful once over. Satisfied that no desperately determined hired killers had infiltrated it, he opened the door once more and held it courteously for her.

"Thank you, Andrew," she said gravely, and stepped through it.

Colonel LaFollet stood well behind the Steadholder in the noisy range and watched her punch holes in anachronistic paper targets with meticulous precision. Her automatic produced a cloud of sharp-smelling smoke, unlike the pulsers most people came here to fire, but at least there were enough other chemical firearm afficionados in the Navy for the range to have been provided with a highly efficient ventilation system.

It was somehow typical of her that she preferred the ancient, traditional paper to the highly sophisticated, holographically created targets which were used in virtually every combat marksmanship training program. The colonel had often thought that her preference resulted from the way she saw shooting, as much as an art form as a serious form of self defense. She approached her beloved coup de vitesse and her lessons in Grayson-style swordsmanship exactly the same way. Not that she took her training in them any less seriously, as her track record of carnage in all three amply demonstrated. And she did spend at least one session per week working the combat range against realistically programmed holographic opponents.

She was just as good at shooting holes in the bad guys as in the ancient silhouette and bull's-eye paper targets which were her preferred victims, too.

Although he was never likely to pass up the opportunity to tease her, respectfully of course, about her choice of weapons, LaFollet took great comfort from her skill with the antique handgun High Admiral Matthews had presented to her. If he had his way, Lady Harrington would never again have the opportunity to demonstrate her proficiency at self defense, but his past lack of success in that regard didn't exactly inspire him with confidence for the future. It was scarcely his fault she kept attracting assassination attempts, close personal encounters with bloodthirsty megalomaniac pirates, and transportation to hellhole prison planets, but that didn't change the fact that she did. Which meant Andrew LaFollet was intensely in favor of anything which made her harder to kill.

Nor was the colonel ever likely to underestimate the lethality of her ear-beating, propellant-spewing hand-cannon. It might be big, noisy, and two thousand years out of date, but that didn't make it ineffective. And unlike his Manticoran counterparts, LaFollet had initially been trained using weapons very like the Steadholder's semiauto. Their designs might have been somewhat more sophisticated, and the materials of which they'd been constructed had certainly been more advanced, but the basic operating principles had been virtually identical. He and his security service colleagues had traded them with gleeful jubilation for the pulsers Grayson's alliance with the Star Kingdom had finally made available, yet the twelve T-years he'd spent training with them first left him with a profound respect for their capabilities. Besides, he'd once seen the Steadholder use the very same "antique" .45 to kill two fully prepared opponents armed to the teeth with "modern" weapons.

Not that the hopefully remote possibility that she might someday be required to once again personally wreak effective mayhem against armed opponents was the only reason he was perfectly happy to stand around in a smoky, noisy pistol range while she sent bullet after bullet downrange. No. However comforting he might find her proficiency, the real reason he had no objection to her range visits was much simpler.

They relaxed her. Even more, perhaps, than her coup de vitesse katas, her shooting sessions required a complete mental break from all of the host of problems which currently beset her. The need to empty her mind while she concentrated on muscle memory, on breathing, on grip and trigger control, on capturing the sights and sight picture . . . Nothing could have been better designed to distract her, however briefly, from the current political and diplomatic lunacy which had come to focus more and more intensively on her. And that, all by itself, was more than sufficient to win Andrew LaFollet's enthusiastic endorsement.

Which didn't mean he approached her trips to the range without a certain trepidation. For one thing, he wasn't at all in favor of allowing anyone—even fellow naval officers—into the Steadholder's presence with weapons in their hands. He knew better than to raise that particular point with Lady Harrington, however, which was why he'd somehow overlooked reporting to her about the private conversation he'd had with Sergeant Johannsen's predecessor over four T-years ago. The colonel had long since discovered that the easiest way to prevent the Steadholder from complaining about irksome security considerations was simply not to mention them to her. Not even Lady Harrington could get exercised over something she didn't know about, although keeping secrets from her wasn't exactly the easiest thing in the universe.

In this case, though, he was reasonably certain she remained blissfully unaware that Johannsen, like the last range officer, discreetly saw to it that no other shooter was ever admitted to the range while she was at the line. It was certainly possible that sooner or later she would begin wondering why she always seemed to have the range to herself, of course. When she did, she was probably going to ask some extremely pointed questions, and LaFollet wasn't looking forward to answering them. But in the meantime, his if-you-don't-ask, I-won't-tell policy seemed to be working just fine, and tomorrow could look after itself when it got here.

Despite his arrangement with Johannsen, LaFollet's well-trained and carefully honed sense of paranoia prevented him from ever completely relaxing his vigilance. Even as he watched the Steadholder systematically removing the "X" ring from yet another silhouette at a range of fifteen meters, his eyes also constantly scanned the other shooting stations and watched the soundproofed door into the range proper.

Which was why he became aware of the arrival of the tall, broad shouldered, blue-eyed man well before Lady Harrington did.

The colonel recognized the newcomer the instant he stepped through the door, but his professionally expressionless face hid his dismay admirably. Not that LaFollet disliked the new arrival. In point of fact, he admired and respected Admiral Hamish Alexander, Thirteenth Earl of White Haven, almost as much as he admired and respected Lady Harrington, and under other circumstances, he would have been delighted to see him. As it was . . .