"Alive? Can you tell, from there - make it bigger, that's him."

He makes it bigger by another several factors. Yes, that's a person. An alive person, as of the time the holo was taken.

"We should leave right now."

"Yes. Maybe. Yes."

His brain fills with tactical and political considerations, churns over them for a couple of seconds, and comes around to:

"There's a case to be made that the time to make an assault on Angband is right now while we have as many people armed with my weapons as we're going to get anytime soon and the amount of thinking and preparing your Enemy is able to do about the situation is minimized." He dismisses the image of the mountains. "The fact that this would also be the optimal course for rescuing your brother... need not be mentioned until we either come back with him or don't."

"You're pretty great, Miles. Let's convince Maglor. Of the first thing."

Miles grins. "Let's."

They come in much sooner than he'd been expecting them. Miles is looking a little bit the way their father sometimes got when worked up.

"Your people learned my weapons faster than I expected them to," says Miles. "It may be that I should be planning the assault on Angband for today, before the Enemy has any more chance to decide what to do about me."

Well. 

"Do you all die so young because you're this hurried, or do you hurry because you're all dying?"

"A little of one, a little of the other."

"Well, the Enemy is one of the Ainur, and paces himself like us. I don't think we need to leave today. Surely there's more they could learn?"

"The Enemy sent a Balrog after my shuttle within a day of my arrival. That didn't work. It may well be he'll wait ten years before trying the next thing, or it may be that he won't, but it doesn't seem obvious to me that he'll give me time to train everyone here to flawless expertise in my weapons. And I don't have any reason to hope he'll give me time to figure out how to make more of my weapons, or of anything similarly complicated. The Enemy may pace himself like you, but I pace myself like myself, and if I'm prepared and he isn't, that sounds like a good time to go cause him as much trouble as I can manage."

"And you're prepared? Really? For an assault on Angband? We don't even know what's there, we don't know how many Balrogs there are, we don't have a means of getting in - or are you thinking the shuttle?"

"I am thinking the shuttle. Do we have a better way to find out what's there than by scanning it on the way?"

"And if it's something you can't manage, or can't manage without planning?"

"Turn around and go home, I suppose. But tactical improvisation does happen to be one of my greatest strengths. I think the central remaining question is, is there anything you want removed from the fortress before I do my best to level it?"

Maglor looks up, at that, and goes quite still for a second. "You should not delay doing your best to level Angband, once you're there."

"Understood."

"That was a nice speech. About doing things at your pace, I mean. I owe you one - if we pull this off, but even if it fails, and in that case I probably won't get to tell you so later. So. Thanks."

"You're welcome."

And now: planning. Miles wants the majority of the armed Elves to stay at the camp, on the logic that he's bombing Angband, not organizing a commando raid; but the shuttle doesn't have externally mounted nerve disruptors, and a Balrog could probably damage it if they tried, so he does want the six best shots, Tyelcormo included, provided they are all willing to brace themselves by the shuttle's various apertures and shoot at Balrogs.

He also very carefully plans for the - unlikely, he thinks, but certainly possible - event that he doesn't come back. He makes sure all the readers are fully supplied with books, takes everything out of the shuttle that he isn't going to need and stacks up the crates on float pallets next to his landing spot, writes out his best description from memory of the power generation problem and includes that in the readers' libraries, sets up a comm relay so he can transmit detailed scans of everything back to the readers in the camp - generally makes sure to maximize his hypothetical posthumous contribution to the camp's prosperity.

There is one grav stretcher left in the back of the shuttle, in case it comes in handy. Someone could end up injured enough that they can't move on their own but not enough that they have to be abandoned.

Also, in case it comes in handy for whatever reason, here is how you cut metal with a plasma arc.

For five years he's been terrified that Maedhros wasn't dead. Now he's terrified that he is. Because surely this is bait, intended to lure them into precisely what they're doing: why else hang a prisoner outside your fortress? And yet why bait someone whose capabilities you don't understand? Or does the Enemy think he can take Miles prisoner?

He mentions the possiblity once you're in the air. 

"If he moved my brother to a location where he knew your scan would see him, he knows your capabilites better than we thought, and is probably doing this specifically to bait you into his hands."

"I suppose we'll see how well that works out for him."

As their altitude increases, he does repeated, detailed scans of the surrounding territory and sends them back to the camp.

"...If he did put your brother out where I could see him, though, that implies that he knew I was coming. That holo was taken early in my first flight, not long after I arrived."

"....he is a Vala."

"And yet... I don't know, it doesn't stand up to strategic analysis. Even if he's very very bad at strategy, which is not the impression I've gotten, there are so many things he could have done if he'd known I was coming that make more sense than that, at least if you assume his goals include making your life difficult."

"Yeah." He drums his fingers on the windowpanes. "So probably not. If he does capture you, though, that's worth more than anything else he can do to make our lives difficult."