“It doesn’t matter, stupidworks,” she answered bitterly, watching as Margia left the armory and headed toward the contest, smiling coldly at Tammy as she passed her.
By the time both Margia and Tammy had arrived back at the contest, most of the shooting had taken place. The contest wasn’t in itself a competition. It was just something that the Amazon warriors used to spice up the otherwise dull target practice. There was an air of good humor about the shooting, and J.B. found the different stances and shooting styles of the contestants fascinating. So much so that he hadn’t even noticed that Mildred had refrained from talking to him.
But even the laconic armorer noticed the change in atmosphere when Margia returned. She headed straight for Mildred.
“What do you shoot with?” she asked casually.
“ZKR 551, Czech made.”
Margia raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think I’ve ever come across one of those,” she said easily. “What caliber?”
“It’s a .38,” Mildred answered.
Margia held out her hand. “Can I see?”
Mildred shrugged. Standing right in front of her, and in front of the others, there was nothing that the blonde could do to Mildred’s blaster.
But Margia had timed her question carefully.
“Your turn,” Jess said to them.
Mildred went to take back her blaster, but Margia had produced her own from the sheathed holster in the small of her back. “Mind if I shoot with yours? It’ll be fair if I give you mine, ’cause we’ll both have unfamiliar blasters.”
Mildred wavered for a second. She knew this was a trick of some kind, but couldn’t for the life of her work out what Margia was pulling. To refuse and cause a scene would mean loss of face in front of J.B. and the other members of the Gate. J.B. she could put in the picture later, but the Gate…
“Okay,” Mildred assented with a deceptively casual shrug. “And God help you if you’re setting me up, lady,” she muttered to herself.
They walked to the line in the earth from where the target practice would begin. Margia took position first, and sighting carefully along the barrel of the ZKR, rattled off five shots in quick succession. From their position on the sheet covering the target, it could clearly be seen that the shots had clustered around the center.
“You now,” Margia said with a smirk that made Mildred’s spine crawl.
She sighted along the blaster Margia had given her, a Kimber .45 ACP pistol. The compact blaster had a barrel that located directly into the slide, and it held seven rounds. Mildred loosed them in a smooth repeating squeeze of her trigger finger, but even as the first round left the barrel she knew that something was wrong. The weight of the blaster felt wrong, as though something had somehow thrown it out of alignment. The discharged rounds kicked back in an asymmetric manner, causing the spread of hits to be wider than Margia’s by no small degree. Even without looking, Mildred knew that her performance had been the worst of the contest, and even as she seethed at the deception of the blond armorer, so a part of her kept cool and looked at the blaster, searching for the cause of the problem.
“Not quite what I expected,” Margia said quietly, keeping the exaltation out of her voice. She looked over to J.B., and said, “Mebbe you’d better think of joining up with us on a regular basis, if this is the best you can do.”
Mildred looked across at the Armorer. He was phased by Mildred’s poor show. She knew that the last thing he would do was blame her, but that didn’t alter the fact that she had let her friends down—albeit by a treacherous hand. Her gaze returned to the blaster in her hand.
“Don’t blame the tools, sweetie,” Margia said in an acid tone, swiftly removing the Kimber from Mildred’s grasp and replacing it with the ZKR.
Margia left Mildred impotent with rage and humiliation, left to questioning stares from Tammy and Krysty and left the others reflecting on the poor performance of the much-vaunted sharpshooter.
Left with the Kimber nestling against the small of her back, holding fast its little secret—the delicate work on the barrel that threw its alignment and made it Margia’s secret weapon for anyone in the tribe, or out of the tribe, who might cross her.