I've been up for almost 24 hours straight now, but since I'm at the front desk and in danger of falling asleep, I've decided to critique instead.
Minor thing:
Back inside the airlock, she felt the slight tug of the ship’s gravity pulling her boots towards the floor of the compartment, getting stronger as she approached the interior hatch.
I've just been doing physics homework, so forgive me, but there's no way she felt gravity there, unless there's artificial gravity in the ship (even then, I don't know if she'd feel a tug, she would just be accelerated to the plane of the artificial gravity. Remember, if there's no resistance the tug won't feel noticeable). Doing some quick number crunching, if that ship is 10,000 kilograms and shes only a meter away, the most gravitional force you'll get is something like 7 times 10^-14 Newtons. Feel free to add plenty more zeroes onto the ships mass--you'll need a lot more to counteract that universal gravitational constant (6.022 * 10^-23). Gravity is a really weak force.
Also, I must ask
Surprisingly, the pod glided away without so much as a jar. It didn’t have view ports, but they did have front and back image feeds, and they got to watch the ‘new’ ship collide with a moon-sized asteroid. One moment the ship was heading right for it, the next there was nothing more than a cloud of shrapnel.
One of
our moon's size? That's uh, really big.
The moonlet has air? That's quite, uh, interesting. And surprising.
Physics nitpicking aside...
I'd like more description about the location of where they crashed. I didn't precisely understand until she mentioned it in the dialogue. A little description can go a long way.
The writing was solid. I agree with Cynic, the part fixing the ship was quite well written. Overall the prose is solid, though I wonder about your character development slightly. She seems to blame him for the engine exploding unjustly. It's not his fault it blew up, and his plan to get out of there was sound. She didn't have any other plan to get the pod to safety, so his was as good as any. ...That sounded harsh. I'm sorry. During reading, it really wasn't that big of a deal, it merely irked me a touch.
Is this a short story? If so, I'm definitely interested to see the resolution, but I worry it won't have as much impact as I expect an Act Two/Three to have.
But solid writing. That's always good