Impact 2

Impact
His squadron had been wiped out. Kaleb knew he was the last. He stood in the open cockpit of his aircraft, and breathed in the ocean air. He was a young man, his short hair greasy from the day’s stress and his flight mask still hanging from his neck. The crisp sea breeze blew past him, its smell mixed with the stink of burning fuels and scorched metal. He gazed up into the endless sky above him, immense towers of pure black smog reaching up from the ground, scarring the red light of the sunset like a wound on the atmosphere. The battle had been terrible; they had been slaughtered, just as they had expected. Still, they had fought anyway, struggling against the invaders. The airfield around him was scattered with the last traces of activity, the remaining flight crews putting out the fires and clearing the wreckage of a dozen failed landings. Around him, a team of men modified his aircraft.
“Kaleb. It’s time.”
Kaleb looked down. His commanding officer Nerul, a man barely older than he was, stood at the base of the plane. Nerul held his cap under his arm, his dress uniform once sharp but now dirty with the day’s sweat. The grime in the air stuck to both the men’s faces, leaving their skin darkened. They stared at each other for a moment, until Kaleb eventually sat down in the cockpit’s seat. For a second, it seemed as though Nerul would salute him. He reached up, and Kaleb shook his hand in a long grip. Around the rear of the plane, technicians finished removing the refuelling tubes as they completed their work. “No one else can do this Kaleb. It has to be you,” Nerul told him.
Kaleb stared ahead and nodded. “The battleship’s co-ordinates have been uploaded into your system. You’re sure of what you need to do?” Nerul asked him.
Kaleb nodded again, and turned to look at Nerul once more. For a second, it seemed as though Nerul would salute him. He reached up, and Kaleb shook his hand in a long grip. “The rocket will take you up to the top of its trajectory. From then on, it’s down to you. Go,” Nerul said.
Kaleb flipped a switch, and the cockpit canopy descended over him and locked. A few seconds later, and the rocket ignited, beginning the journey of carrying him far up through the atmosphere.
The cockpit shook and rattled as the rocket and jet soared through turbulence.
Kaleb could hear Nerul through his headset. “Your telemetry looks good, you’re on target,” the voice reported.
Kaleb reached into the pocket of his flight suit and retrieved a small device of his own design. He moved his headset from one ear, and connected a long earpiece to his device, which his positioned in his free ear. He flipped a switch, and tuned the frequency till he got a clear channel. Outside, the wind and atmosphere continued to batter his small craft as the immense missile carried him ever higher.
“Inisia, are you there?” he asked.
Far below him, a young woman grabbed a battered radio kept next to her bed and held it tightly. “Kaleb!” she said. “I thought you were dead.”
“I’m not,”
“You whole squadron was destroyed!”
Kaleb breathed deeply. “Tell me about the life we were going to have, Inisia,”
She hesitated for a moment. “The life we were going to have?” Her imagined her sat on the mattress of her small house, a gentle breeze blowing in from the open doorway, the radio on her lap. “One day, Kaleb, we’ll be free. We’ll have no worries, or cares. It’ll be just you and me, and no one will ever take you away again.” [Inisia’s setting / simple possessions help characterise her. But suddenly shifting to Inisia’s point of view and setting jerks the reader too suddenly away from Kaleb, in my view. We are getting immersed in his experience, and this shift disrupts that. I think the story would work better if you stuck with Kaleb’s point of view here (especially here, and possibly throughout). You could have: ‘He imagined her sitting cross-legged on the mattress….. setting the radio on her lap…’ etc, allowing us to share his vision of her. I won’t point out all the changes required to layout / presentation after this – you can check the rest for yourself.]
Nerul’s voice crackled in his other ear, “You’re leaving the stratosphere, the missile should begin to alter its trajectory soon. Keep going.”
“There’ll be no invasion, and no armies to keep you away. You’ll be here with me, for as long as you could want. We can swim in the oceans, and at night we can go visit the islands. We can just spend all day in bed, if we want,” she told him.
Outside, the skies began to darken as the planet became distant below him.
“We can watch the sun set together, and we’ll fall asleep as the sun rises again,” said Inisia quietly. “We’ll eat on the beach, and drink rum juice when its night.”
Outside, ice crystals began to spread across Kaleb’s cockpit window. The whole structure creaked dangerously.
“Nearly there, Kaleb. It’s nearly time for you to take control,” said Nerul.
“Tell me more, Inisia,” said Kaleb.
“We can stay hidden away here, ...