a song of fire and water

You were cold. You felt the nightmarish feeling of water filling your lungs. You opened your eyes to see you were 3 meters bellow water.

You started swimming up to get out but something held you in place. Smith was there, wearing as you did some boots her tool belt and white underwear.

She held you down, she was wearing a small capsule on her face. She removed it and gave it to you. You took a long breath of air from it.

Suddenly the world went white , then red and yellow. The shockwave muffled by the depth of water was still one you knew...

A plasma core overload.

The Gorgon was gone. Without fail-safes or the intervention of a brave engineer the high yield reactor would disintegrate the ship if it went off.

The water above you was heating up and the level had gone down by over a meter.

Smith taking back the capsule dragged you to the shore.

You exit though the burning water and see a spectacle of devastation. Around you as far as you can see, ashes, embers, even molten rock is dripping from the waterfall into the water you were in.

No trace of your ship on the top of the small cliff above this pond can be found.

"Captain are you OK?" Asked Smith.

"Smith, what happened?" You screamed still partly deafened from the blast. (The water saved us, on the surface we would have ended, blind, deaf or roasted.)

"We crashed, but you knew that one. I woke up with the alarm blaring, critical failure in the main plasma core, nothing to do about it. I couldn't wake you up so I dragged you and jumped in the water, I couldn't find Williams." She told you with tears in her eyes, guilty to have left her friend behind.

"You didn't abandon her. She died from the torpedo hit before the crash, I buried her with honors when we arrived. Thank you for saving me Ensign." You told her in an attempt to make her feel better and get to grapple with what happened to her friend.

"As there is no ship left, you could call me Diana, it's kind of ridiculous to maintain protocol while wearing underwear in a jungle." she proposed.

"You are right Diana, I was a captain less than a day anyway, we are both engineers, I'd like us to be team rather than crewmember and officer. Call me Alex." You conceded.

You were never an outdoors man. You grew in the Institute in the gigantic capital city on Ophidia and then the academy in the same city, before serving 2 years in the depths of a giant ship. You had tools and a gun (you were good on a range but never shot anything in combat), Diana in her white underwear made see through by the water picked a direction and opened the way.

Following her, your eyes stuck to to the movement of her swaying ass you thought of how you would survive on this world and what could be lurking in these woods.