You can't breathe in space.

"You can't breathe in space. It's not like suffocating because someone puts a pillow over your head, or drowning in the ocean. You breathe out a lungful of oxygen and then there's nothing at all to breathe back in."

I took a step away from the captain's station, looking around at the gathered crew, all twenty-six of them at attention. Everything seems so light, as if the entire room is full of lens flare. The ship has just been commissioned, and the crew, in jumpsuits of blue, grey, and red, listen with grave seriousness. I am near the end of my talk, the seemingly endless parade of regulations and clarifying tales all captains are required to tell their crew. Misconceptions are common, even after all the training.

"Unlike some stories say," I continue, "you don't explode, and your blood doesn't boil. You just stop breathing. You turn blue, and you try to cry or scream, but there's no sound in a vacuum. You lose consciousness, and then you die.

"Even if you're brought back, oxygen deprivation causes permanent damage: to the lungs from trying to hold your breath, or to your suffocating brain. Even in space, you stay warm - not because space is warm, but because it takes a while for space to suck away all your body heat. These are the dangers we face just by being out here, the kinds of horrors we all have to remember sit just outside our metal jumpsuit." I gesture to the walls around us, our personal Eden.

Despite the subject matter, I smile. "But this is all talk, the scary stories they make me tell so you don't open the airlock. It is something you will never have to worry about on my ship, under my command. Ladies and gentlemen, with me as your captain, and you as my crew, we will never have to fear for anything. To our ship, to our health, to forever!"

The crew cheers. Then it all fades, the lens flare, the crew, and that day, long gone. The bridge is empty, now.


I flick on the CO2 scrubbers, I flick off the CO2 scrubbers.

I could fill the entire ship (what's left of it) with CO2 and suffocate - it would be slower than venting myself into space, but the same thing would happen. The heat will work for another four days, and then whatever is left of me will freeze. That's what the universe does: it sucks away all the heat from everything, leaving only cold.

I flick the CO2 scrubbers on, look outside the window one last time to see the faces of the rest of the crew, dead where they were vented into space after the enemy ship sundered the hull. Near enough to see, Veras' face looks at me, eyes glazed and frozen, body contorted as it slowly pirouettes through space.

Behind Veras three figures in light blue float, my bridge crew. Sarah D'ami, my second, has her uniform slashed along her back, bloody where she hit something on the way out. Her mouse-brown hair is about her head in chaos, like a firework now, illuminated by the exterior lights.

She and everyone else, my friends, my compatriots, my crew, all gone. From Silo, head engineer, to Keddrick, the ship's doctor, floating like debris, their graveyard unmarked and unknown.

"Captain, come with us."

I shudder. Just me, now.

I pace back and forth on the bridge. From here I have very little control of the ship. The vital systems, things like Life Support, Engines, etcetera, are all deeper in the ship. Opening the doors to try and fix them would be suicide. There's no air in there.

(And to think, I had just been trying to do the right thing.)

I replay the attack in my head over and over. Was there something I could have done, some way I could have moved faster so the others could escape? I don't know. The other ship was faster than I expected, more willing to endanger itself than I had believed it would be. They didn't have enough time, and now they were all dead, every one of them. Twenty-six people.

"Captain," Sarah had pleaded. "Come with us."

The captain always goes down with his ship. I had not abandoned her, but I had failed her.

I flick off the CO2 scrubbers, once and for all. I turn off the ship's power and drench myself in darkness. I walk toward the door, contemplative. There was nothing on the other side, except perhaps a tunnel and a white light. I check my uniform, straighten my Captain's pin and then pull off my medal for bravery in combat. Toss it backward.

One more breath of oxygen. Then I pull on the manual release.


And the captain goes down with his ship.