"The A through D will come out first," Belting said. "They have the tanks and the APCs on them. Once the pilots land we'll have a C-12 bring them back up again and we'll start working on the next four."
"So a couple of days to get everything down?"
"Assuming that nothing goes wrong, yes."
Jackson nodded thoughtfully, sipping out of his coffee.
"LS-A is reporting a good engine start," Kipling reported over the radio link. "He's beginning the pre-flight checks now."
Within a minute the other three ships reported successful engine starts as well. The pre-flight checks on the landing craft took the better part of forty minutes to complete. Belting and Jackson passed the time by discussing Operation Interdiction. So far the secrecy of the operation appeared to have been maintained despite the fact that Marlin had managed to get out a brief radio message before being destroyed. Both men concluded, based upon the arrogant attitudes of the Marlin's commanding officers, who had been pulled from the wreckage by the rescue crews, interrogated at length by Belting himself, and then shipped down to the POW camp in Libby, that even if the Earthlings received the message they would have a hard time putting stock in it.
"They're arrogance is what is going to lose the war for them," Jackson said with a sad shake of the head. "Just the way it happened in the Jupiter War."
"Thank God for their arrogance then," said Belting.
The pre-flight checks were completed a few minutes later with no problems or reasons to delay being found. Lieutenant Carrie Sing, the pilot of ship A was the first on the radio to announce she was ready to separate from the Panama.
"Go with separation sequence LS-A," Kipling's voice told her. "Releasing docking clamps on your order."
"Release the clamps," she said, her voice not showing so much as a trace of the nervousness she had to have been feeling.
The clamps were released and a moment later the first craft began to rise from the hull of the massive Panama, drifting slowly upward, meter by meter, until it was well above the arc of the loading door.
"I'm one hundred meters above the door," Sing said. "Beginning to maneuver."
"Beginning to maneuver," Kipling acknowledged.
The thrusters on the front of the ship came to life, slowing it just a bit and allowing it to drift backwards in the corridor. The top thrusters fired a few times as well, stabilizing the ship and keeping it from drifting any higher. Once the ship was well away from the Panama the front thrusters went quiet and the opposing corner thrusters lit up, slowly turning the ship around, so that the main engines on the rear were facing towards the direction of orbit. Just as it got turned around and positioned for the de-orbit burn, the second of the landing craft began to rise out of the Panama.
It took another twenty minutes for all four landing craft to exit the ship, get turned around in their orbits, and get stabilized for their burns. Everything went as smoothly as could be expected, with all four of them ending up in a line about two kilometers apart.
"Okay LS-A," Belting said into the radio. "Looks like you're first. Initiate your de-orbit burn whenever you're ready."
"I'm as ready as I'll ever be, Admiral," Sing responded. "Main engines are ready for ignition, navigation data is programmed. Initiating burn sequence now." She paused for a moment. "Burn sequence initiated. Ignition in ten seconds."
The seconds ticked off agonizingly slowly and then a bright white light flared from the rear of the landing craft. It seemed to accelerate rapidly out of the camera's view though it was actually slowing down at a tremendous rate. The A-12 that was recording the event lit its own engines up and began to chase after it. Soon the ship was back on their screens, it's engines burning brightly.
"Burn is initiated," came Sing's voice. "All systems operating within parameters. Course is on the line. Termination of de-orbit burn in four minutes."
"Copy that, Sing," Belting responded. "You're looking mighty pretty from here. LS-B, you're next. As soon as her burn is completed, go ahead and initiate yours."
One by one the landing ships burned their main engines for a specific amount of time, slowing the ships down so that the Martian gravity could pull them downward to a controlled entry into the atmosphere. The speed of their descent was carefully timed so that they would drop neatly into a window that would terminate their final re-entry right over the city of Eden on the other side of the planet. Different computations and different angles of entry would have allowed them to land at any other Martian spaceports.
Ninety-three minutes went by before Landing Ship A started the final re-entry sequence. Lieutenant Sing used the maneuvering thrusters to turn the ship around once more, so that its nose was angled upward and its belly, where the heat shield was located, was poised to take the brunt of reentry. Five minutes later the ship made its first contact with the thin atmosphere. The underside began to glow as the heat of friction was generated, softly at first but then with increasing fury until nothing more than a fiery streak was visible. The ship gradually decelerated from orbital speed to a relatively lackadaisical 1100 kilometers per hour. It continued to fall out of the Martian sky like a rock, it's forward velocity carrying it over the equatorial plains and mountain ranges.
"All systems still on the line," reported Sing. "Course is still steady. I'll begin landing maneuvers shortly."
As she approached the city from the west she was still at an altitude of more than 20,000 meters. She employed the powerful forward thrusters to slow her speed while the ship continued to fall. When her forward speed was only 150 kilometers per hour, the greenhouse complexes were below her and her altitude had dropped to 6000 meters. The landing ship was far too large for wings to have any effect on its flight path. To slow the descent to a speed that was not lethal, more thrusters were used, these ones on the bottom of the ship. They lit at Sing's command and the fall became more controlled, gentler.
"Spaceport in sight," she reported when she was ten kilometers out. "Lined up on the landing path. All systems operating normally."
She began to manipulate the bottom and the front thrusters more, adjusting her speed and descent as the landing strip grew nearer.
"Deploying landing gear," she said, and a moment later eight sets of wheeled gear slid out of slots on the bottom, their locations well clear of the landing thrusters, which would have melted the synthetic rubber and the steel alike.
The ship drifted down on jets of fire, coming to a soft touchdown less than ten meters from the middle of the runway. The bottom thrusters were turned off, allowing the ship to settle, but the rear one remained lit, pushing the ship along the concrete surface towards a huge loading area on the far side of the spaceport.
"We copy good touchdown," Admiral Belting said with relief as he watched the MarsGroup camera image of the lumbering ship rolling out. "Excellent job, Lieutenant Sing."
"Thank you, Admiral," she replied, her voice registering that she was quite pleased with herself.
One by one the other three ships came in as well, all of them touching down gently, all of them rolling out to parking slots. Their engines were shut down and their cargo bays were opened, allowing the MPG troops that were standing by in their biosuits to start the job of unloading.
Jeff Waters was one of the troops standing by. With basic training over he was now a full-fledged private first class in the newly formed 17th Armored Calvary Regiment of the Martian Planetary Guard. The 17th had been put together with about one quarter newly trained combat troops, one quarter existing MPG members who had been assigned to non-combat branches before the revolt, and the remainder seasoned combat troops who had been broken up from other units. Matt was assigned to third squad of second platoon of Alpha Company and his unit's armored vehicles were located in Landing Ship B from Tripoli Harbor. Their job today, one of the first that they had been assigned, was to unload those APCs and transport them to staging areas outside of the main MPG base. They were of course dressed in their model 459 biosuits — brand new ones that had been shipped from Environmental Supplies less than a week before — since they were outside the safety of the pressurized building.