by Shawn M. Klimek

To humanity’s great relief, the aliens who had arrived by warp-gate were not conquerors, but law-abiding capitalists who had come hoping to develop our system’s underutilized real estate. In exchange for forfeiting Earth claims to Mars, they proposed to make Venus habitable for human expansion—a price too good to refuse. As more aliens colonized the red planet, and cities grew on Venus, trade between all three flourished.

When Earthlings eventually noticed the New Martians had begun mining Jupiter and terraforming Titan, they demanded compensation.

“Oh, we already own Jupiter by law,” the aliens responded. “Our planet is the nearest.”

Shawn M. Klimek

Shawn M. Klimek’s stories and poems have been published in scores of e-zines and anthologies, including “Grumpy Old Gods, Volume 1”, Zombie Pirate Publishing’s “World War Four”, and “Gold: The Best of Clarendon House Anthologies, Volume One, 2017/2018. Find more, including links to all his published works at A Jot In The Dark