Several years ago, Quita was part of a small science team exploring a pair of large black holes orbiting each other. The gravitational field around the black holes was very intense, but the team felt confident they could get close as long as they stayed above and between the two black holes so they were not pulled towards just one of them. They were pulled towards the point between the two black holes where the gravity between them was matched and the increase in velocity far exceeded their impulse engine's ability to overcome, but they just used their jump drive to alternate between points above and below the center of gravity. The jump drive changed their position, but not their velocity. The reversals in acceleration direction kept their velocity from becoming too high.
Disaster struck!
A small meteoroid struck the ship damaging the jump drive and it's spare. They quickly accelerated towards the black holes. They used the impulse drive to follow a narrow path that would prevent them from being pulled into one of the black holes, but how long could they keep this up? As they approached the center, the ship creaked and groaned under the strain as the difference in gravity across even a few meters grew in strength.
Then things got weird.
They don't exactly remember what happened next other than feeling really strange, but the black holes were gone! In fact the stars they now saw didn't match their star charts. They had been thrown very far! They were fortunate that a star was now very near and were quite relieved to discover a habitable planet only a few months travel away. Their food supply would just hold out if they flew fast.
When they arrived at their new home, there was little fuel left, so they entered the atmosphere fast and hard aiming for the shore of a large ocean. Alas, the strain turned out to be too much for their damaged ship and it started to break apart just a few minutes before landing. They decided to bail out, but only Quita made it before the ship collapsed, trapping her crew mates inside, and sinking into the sea.
The ship crashed into the ocean and sank quickly, but Quita's parachute took her to within swimming distance of the shore. She had to ditch her jumpsuit and survival pack and swim for several hours, but she finally made it to the beach.
Thus, she arrived in her new world naked with only her will to survive and her knowledge of science including her now useless skill as an interstellar navigator.
She lurked in the shadows to explore her new world until she got the hang of things. She was pleasantly surprised to see a wide variety of intelligent species in the area and felt she might be able to blend in. Much to her amazement, she also saw feats of fantastic technology amid a people who otherwise lived a relatively primitive life style.. Her kind had pretty well maxed out their technology thousands of years ago so she wasn't expecting this. She even saw some things she was convinced violated the laws of physics. Then it dawned on her that what see was seeing didn't violate local physics.
Could she be in another universe?
She decided to explore this universe the same way she explored her own. That is with scientific principles. She became known to the locals as a wizard and, despite a frequent prejudice towards her, she did her best to help people as that was the way of her kind.
Copyright © 2017-2018 by David White
This page last updated 24-Jan-2018