The following is excerpt from the novel Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds.
But Nagorny had no intention of waiting for the elevator. With her gun, he forced the door, revealing the echoing depths of the shaft. With nothing in the way of ceremony - not even a goodbye-Nagorny pushed Volyova into the hole.
It was a dreadful mistake.
The shaft threaded the ship from top to bottom; she had kilometers to fall before she hit the bottom. And for a few almost heart stopping moments, she had assumed that was exactly what would happen. She would drop until she hit - and whether it took a few seconds or the better part of a minute was of no consequence at all. The walls of the shaft were sheer and frictionless; there was no way to gain a purchase or arrest her fall in any way whatsoever.
She was going to die.
Then - with a detachment which later shocked her - part of her mind had reexamined the problem. She had seen herself, not falling through the ship, but stationary: floating in absolute rest with respect to the stars. What moved, instead, was the ship: rushing upwards around her. She was not accelerating at all now - and the only thing that made the ship accelerate was thrust.
Which she could control from her bracelet.
Volyova had not had time to ponder the details. An idea had formed - exploded - in her mind, and she knew that either she executed the idea almost immediately or accepted her fate. She could stop her fall - her apparent fall - by ramping the ship's thrust into reverse for however long it took to achieve the desired effect. Normal thrust was one gee, which was why Nagorny had found it so easy to mistake the ship for something like a tall building. She had fallen for perhaps ten seconds while her mind processed things. What was it to be, then? Ten seconds of reverse thrust at one gee? No - too conservative. She might not have enough shaft to fall through. Better to ramp up to ten gees for a second - she knew the engines were capable of that. The maneuver would not harm the other crew, safely cocooned in reefersleep. It would not harm her, either - she would just see the rushing walls of the shaft slow down rather violently.
Nagorny though was not so well protected.
I transcribed this manually so any mistakes are my own not the original author. Alastair Reynolds was a European Space Agency astrophysicist before he became a writer. If you like hard space opera you should definitely go read his stuff.
