"Yes. Sorry."

They're a sufficient distance from camp at this point. If he waits until their trainees are firing the weapons, Maglor almost certainly won't hear him. The trainees will. But - well, he'd been the one to select them.

They reach a flat area. Miles sets himself up so that everyone can see him give the lecture on the safe handling of weapon parts, the difference between the three types, the disassembly and reassembly process and the function of each part, how to make a bomb out of a power pack and why you probably shouldn't; then he demonstrates the range of each, by firing them across a long area of flat ground. Everyone can watch the stunner bolt blur and fade from the air as it whines along, watch the nerve disruptor bolt frazzle itself to death at a little more than half again that distance, and then watch a sequence of plasma bolts make successively less impressive scorch marks on the ground at successively greater distances.

"He didn't make them and can't yet teach us how," Celegorm says, "but he killed a Balrog with them and can teach you that."

"Yes," Miles agrees.

So he distributes weapons from the floating crates and has Tyelcormo help make sure everyone is able to take apart each weapon and check its parts and put it back together correctly, and that they all have the meanings of the various settings and indicator lights straight, and then he sets people to shooting at rocks. Stunners have a power dial which can be turned low to conserve energy and maximize gentleness, or high to abandon gentleness and maximize range. Nerve disruptors have no such feature, but run their power packs down slower than either of the other two anyway. It would be very bad if anyone accidentally hit anyone with a plasma arc or a nerve disruptor, so don't do that.

Their students shoot at rocks. Miles watches with a critical eye and a satisfied smile.

"Miles."

"Yes?"

"There's something - you must have picked up pieces of it. My oldest brother. The Enemy offered to give us a Silmaril, call a truce. We knew we couldn't trust him, but Nelyo thought it'd be worth the chance to play along and get a Silmaril. We sent more than the permitted numbers to the agreed-upon site. He had Balrogs. When the rest of our army arrived, everyone was dead but Nelyo. A year later, the Enemy started sending us pieces."

"I've picked up on a little of this, yes."

"I want to go get him."

"This sounds like the sort of situation where rescue missions are stupid. But then, I've always been the sort of person who goes on the stupid rescue mission anyway, and I haven't yet been made to regret it."

"It is. Cáno said no, when we first learned, and I obviously did not go on a rescue mission then. But now we have something the Enemy could not have anticipated - your weapons - and more reason to think we can pull it off. Cáno will still say no, because he regards not being stupid as his job. But my job is to fight for my family."

"It has frequently seemed to me that my job is to do the impossible. I'm in favour of this rescue mission."

"Great. So, Angband is in the mountains, and they're nearly impassable - but you have maps of them, in the lightning-sculptor, so we can find a way through. I have no idea where he's being kept or if he's still alive, though if we're close enough and he's conscious and still sane, I'll be able to hear his thoughts."

"A way through without the shuttle, you mean?"

"It has limited fuel, right? Cáno will literally kill me if I use that for this. On the other hand, if we're going to drop explosives on Angband anyway, it would be a good distraction to try this."

"People who are having explosives dropped on them are frequently very distracted."

"You might kill Maitimo. But - honestly, that's the best I'm hoping for from this. I don't really think we're going to get out with him."

"A successful rescue does seem unlikely."

But Miles has never been inclined to let that stop him.

"I want to do this right away, before the Enemy learns more of your capabilities and so Maitimo doesn't have to be there a day longer than necessary. Can we take a look at your scans of the area?"

"Yes."

Here is his reader; here is his map; here is just the part of it concerning the impassable mountains.

He looks at it intently. "This is passable. It'd be difficult, but possible. That bit - uh, that looks harder. I wonder if there are tunnels."

"We can look for tunnel entrances on this," he says, fiddling with the image some more. "There's a lot of detail getting left out because the display isn't fine enough to show it..."

"What's that?"

"Not sure."

He re-centers the image on the anomalous thing and zooms in another several factors.

"...oh."