The Keller Memoirs

December 9, 2059
March City, Mars


One thing an assassin should avoid is calling attention to himself before striking the target. I've actually broken this rule twice, but those were special cases.

I spent a good part of my 99th birthday giving a statement to the Federal Marshall in March City after some self-appointed superior being tried to stab me with a improvised plastic dagger. A badly made dagger at that.

Seriously, that idiot actually announced his intention to execute me for crimes against the People and the Earth while holding up the shank in the air with his right hand.

He apparently didn't think, or more likely, feel that I would actually fight back, let alone get in the first blow. I'm old and weak, but I'm not that old and weak.

I was in the process of rearranging the would be assailants face with my right fist when some good citizens of the Martian community pulled me off of him and others placed him under citizen's arrest. This did not stop the idiot from screaming out that I was a murderer.

Yes, I've personally performed a small number of homicides. And every one of them was a self-appointed superior being who looked upon and treated us mere mortals as nothing more than livestock. What I did was not murder, it was morally necessary.

Of course the assassination attempt is causing no end of consternation for the judicial system, both here and on Earth. No one has ever committed a capital crime here. Even though there is no shortage of personal weapons, including firearms. (This is, after all, a colony of the United States of Earth.) Which means no one has ever been executed here before.

And the investigation Earthside thus far has shown that the assailant could not have paid for the ticket to Mars and the repatriation bond on his own. He had a sponsor. The Director of CIS in Omaha has declared the search for that sponsor to be priority one.

Granted, anyone who would blow a major amount of money to knock off an old bastard like me, on another planet, is going to be a problem. But is he really, objectively speaking, that big of a problem?

If nothing else, I got some good exercise today.
_