The morale was strange; waiting has never been a good thing in the mind of a soldier. The more hours passed, the more questions arose in the men's minds. It was not something that was avoidable. What troops will come and attack? Can we handle them?
It's not that they were not experienced troops; it's not that they had lost courage; it was just the effect of the uncertainty of a battle to come.
The only indication they would have had, was a simple cargo ship that remained waiting for the last shipment from the planet. A decoy that had to be sacrificed.
The stratosphere and certain areas of the surface were full of electromagnetically charged probes. They were small, more of a ruse than a weapon. Aeneas and the rest knew that the enemies would not fall into the same ruse several times and would have something prepared, that their engines would restart, and that they would not be able to avoid the fight on the surface no matter how hard they tried. They planned.