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 It might be big, noisy, and two thousand years out of date, but that didn’t make it ineffective.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.