This is the portion of the opener that your character(s) would be aware of:
Fortunately for both the Piper and the civilians below, the ship's cloaking device remained undamaged until the final impact. The artificial gravity generator gave out at the same time, so that both devices, each weighing at least a quarter ton, flew forward and to the right, to slam through the forward bulkhead. Other objects, most lighter, but some heavier, went flying as well. Due to the ship striking the mountainside with an almost fourty-five degree yaw, Gadreg's tail, fully forward of his two charges, could not restrain them. Both slid out from under his tail, careening toward the starboard bow corner of the bridge. Abiallan screamed and grabbed for her husband's ankle, even as Gadreg wrenched his tail from the deck and whipped it around in an attempt to catch her. Neither was fast enough. Abiallan slammed into the starboard wall with a sickening crunch and bounced, plowing the doctor, already silent in acceptance of his fate, into the forward wall with deadly force.
Being semi-aquatic, Abiallan had very dense and heavy bones. The doctor also came from a relatively low-gravity planet. He died instantly, with relatively little pain. Abiallan lost consciousness, cracked three vertebra to pinch her spinal cord, and broke several ribs, three of which punctured her lungs - both of them. The impacts also collapsed her right lung. As if that wasn't enough, Gadreg opened a deep gash on her left thigh in his attempt to catch her.
Though the shape of his spikes guaranteed that the only direction Gadreg could go was straight aft, he wasn't home free. The communications console, in the port stern section of the bridge, also tore loose of its moorings. The two-hundred pound 'desk' spun across the bridge, striking Gadreg on the back hard enough to jostle his spine, pinching the motor and sensation nerves to his legs.
As soon as everything settled down, except for a half-dozen alarms going off, Gadreg pulled his arm spikes, and, with a little more effort, his leg spikes, out of the deck. He then proceeded to drag himself painfully toward the exit. After struggling for a few minutes, he got to the forward air lock and used his tail to slice open the panel containing the Planetside Survival kit. Opening it, he removed the universal translator and clipped it to his belt, then removed a self-righting holographic position flare. He adjusted it for the conditions, turned it on, and threw it out the hatch.
The moment the holoflare hit the snow just a couple feet from the treeline, it activated, emitting a one hundred foot high chartreuse arrow pointing toward the computer banks in the center of the ship. Just in case nobody noticed that, he pulled out a flare launcher and fired a chartreuse flare up and out, over the trees.
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