6162021

	Con Thur looked on as the last light of a dead man burned its way across the void.
	The model of the lifeboat was unfamiliar to him.  It was painted interplanetary orange and shaped like a dodecahedron. Ten of the sides had portholes, two opposite sides a hatch, and a jet thruster protruded from each vertex. One of these was working overtime, and reminded him of his young nephew’s simplistic drawings of shooting stars.
	Narik leaned against the bulkhead. He was chewing his way through a fat piece of lead. “S’not stopping.”
	“Yeah,” mused Thur. “Not only ain’t it stopping, but it’s wasting a mighty amount of fuel too, ‘specially for a lifeboat.” He swiveled his cockpit to face his superior. “Either it’s mainframe isn’t responding or it’s pilot isn’t. Shall we take a closer look?”
	Narik gave the go-ahead. The lifeboat’s Bluetooth popped up when the Little Lover got within range, labeled as the word “rescue”’ in what Little Lover identified as sarcogi. Thur connected and instructed the Rescue to latch onto the starboard hatch. He flipped on the Rescue’s com system, set automatic translation to sarcogi, and began broadcasting. “Howdy, rescue. Anyone home?”
	No answer.
He confirmed that the lifeboat’s coms were up, as well as checking the overall condition of the craft. All clear across the board, aside from being dangerously low on fuel.
	Narik bent down to look at the monitor. “Hurm.”
	“You see somethin’?”
	“Yeah. Check out the atmosphere. Nitrogen and oxygen, ‘bout a four to one ratio.”
	“Do the Sarcogi not breathe that?”
	“Sarcogi don’t breathe at all, Thur. Completely noncorporeal. But someone wasted a lot of power just to get some air. Lover, what sapient breathes this ratio of nitrogen to oxygen?”
	Little Lover’s screen flashed to a diagram of Thur’s least favorite race of bipeds in the entire cluster. He sighed. “No good deed, yeah?”