Fall by Russell Lutz

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The impact of drag is based on atmospheric pressure. I wouldn't experience a measurable amount of drag for about six minutes.

There was another factor that I had to consider. The atmosphere generation happened on the surface, using solar power. Every minute, thousands of tons of oxygen and nitrogen were pumped into the slowly thickening American sky. Just like a liquid, these gasses sought out the lowest levels of the planet. The currents of air from the Highlands into the Pit created a constant downward flow. At the top of the cliff, I outran the flow easily in just the first two seconds of fall. As I reached the five-minute mark, a changeover was going to occur.

The shape of the Pit starts as a smooth canyon, reaching from 2,500 kilometers to the north, extending 3,000 kilometers to the south. As you descend, the distant corners work their way in, funneling into a narrower hole. Air flowing quite sedately from the Highlands surface gets squeezed into a tighter space, and so it speeds up.

According to my calculations, after five minutes and ten seconds, the speed of the downward current would catch up to me and add to the effect of gravity, making me fall even faster. I expected this.

I didn't expect to feel it like a kick in the back.

For this part of my fall I had to change my strategy. I leaned over, put my arms to my sides, pulled my legs together, and torpedoed down. To Earth skydivers, this would seem to be madness, but I had to minimize the impact of the air rushing down on me, and this was the best way to do it.

Dozens of times back on Earth, I would race friends to the ground, daring them to do this for as long as they could stand. It usually wasn't long before they reverted to a more comforting arms-out box man. I always wanted to build up as much speed as possible.

At half a million meters down, I was traveling at 3,500 meters per second, and accelerating. I was one quarter of the way there.

The canyon was as dark as a cave by this point. My suit was equipped with radar, which I switched on from a button inside my right glove, under my index finger. A wire frame depiction of the rock walls on either side of me appeared on my helmet's faceplate. I knew I was still several hundred meters from the west face and still nearly a kilometer from the east, but the radar images showed them moving so fast it felt like they had to be centimeters from me. I wanted to look away, but it was very important at this stage that I keep in mind a clear picture of my surroundings.

At seven minutes and sixteen seconds several things happened at once. First, this was the halfway point, one thousand kilometers down from the Highlands. Since I'd fallen so far into the planet, and the pull of gravity had lessened every second, this was the threshold of Earth normal. My acceleration was, briefly, down to a familiar 9.8 meters per second per second. Which was good, since I was falling at nearly five thousand meters per second, or in other words, a brisk 18,000 kmh.