Ace desperately clawed her way away from the hole of certain death, she began to realise that relative safety wasn’t going to be easy to achieve. Over the course of months that she pent working on this ship, she became very used to its layout and knew every single corridor, every single turn and every single room. She knew very well, that in front of her, a couple meters away, was going to be a considerable drop that led towards the hatch. The drop had no ladder, but that hadn’t been a problem for Ace, or anyone else on the crew, because they were completely used to working in zero gravity. Now, however, the conditions in the ship were the farthest thing from zero-G, and the gravitational pull of the planet, centrifugal force of the ship spinning out of control and the acceleration of it hurling towards the ground had turned this inconspicuous drop towards safety into a possible death trap.
Although, what safety was there behind that hatch in a ship that was actively falling apart while plummeting towards the ground from the outer layers of the atmosphere? Ace had no time to have a completely fair, rational thought like this. She was panicking and her panicked brain told her to get away from the doomed engine block as quickly as possible. Nothing else mattered to her at that moment, not the fact that if she managed to get through the hatch, there would still be no safety and definitely not the fact that getting to that hatch in the first place was hardly going to be an easy task.
The magnetic hold of her boots was slipping, and the small debris smashed against her, slowing her down, but finally, Ace reached the ledge of the drop. She crouched down, peering over the edge and immediately froze in fear. The familiar drop, which she thought had always been quite short, now, in these extreme conditions, seemed to extend down forever, looking extremely dangerous. In gravity, all distances seemed to be bigger.
I am going to die here
As she made her way towards the chute, she was planning to mindlessly jump down and hope for the best, but now that she actually saw how far that “down” was, her self-preservation instincts kicked in and overrode the panic and confusion she had been experiencing. She started to think. Jumping down meant a very probable death, but staying here meant certain death.
As if confirming her thoughts, a big wrench hurled past her head, missing her by a couple of inches. If it had hit, she would have been dead. She needed to hurry, get out of here quick.
Even in the most dire moments like this, Ace always proved to be extremely decisive and acted fast. This situation she had found herself in was not an exception, so she didn’t waste any more time.
Remembering that the palms of her gloves were also magnetic, she turned around and firmly attached one of her hands to what had become the floor directly next to the ledge. She was now crouched down next to it with her knees against her chin and her back turned towards the drop, tightly gripping the ledge with her hand. Taking a deep breath and tightly closing her eyes, she turned off the magnets in her boots and… jumped down.
Anchored to the ledge with her hand, she hit the wall of the chute with her whole body, instead of immediately falling down. She tried to avoid hitting her head on impact with the wall, but despite her best efforts, the side of her helmet still slammed against the steel plate. The crack in the reinforced glass of the visor got bigger and her head hurt, but despite this, she was clinging onto the ledge of the drop like she had planned. She immediately placed her free hand against the wall, activating the magnet, detached the other one from the ledge and placed it lower.
It didn’t matter that there was no ladder, she was going to attempt to climb down towards the hatch using her magnetic gloves.
I am not going to die here