He puts his reader away.

"...How much weight can your horses carry? This armour is very heavy."

"May I try to lift you, rather than try to describe our units of measure?"

"Yes."

He lifts him. A few inches. "Eru. What kind of metal is this?"

"A heavy kind. Several heavy kinds. Again, I didn't make it."

"I'm not going to ask that of the horses. Time is at a premium, though - perhaps we can travel at a run? How can you even move in that?"

"It holds up its own weight. Probably well enough to let me run the whole way back to the shuttle faster than I could by myself. I can try, at least."

"Not if it might leave you exhausted. I expect that we're running into a fight."

"Yeah. Well - I have ways of handling exhaustion temporarily, if it comes to that."

"When we arrived here, the Enemy was frightened. He'd expected Father but he didn't think that our people would follow him, and he thought it would take us much longer. He sent every orc and every valarauka in the continent at us. The fighting lasted three weeks. We couldn't rest, because we hadn't yet built shelter. They kept coming, and coming, and coming, until at last we had some semblance of shelter from the piles of their bodies. We won. But Father -"

"I am telling you this because it would be very unfortunate if you overextended yourself on your first day here."

"I will avoid overextending myself."

They head out. He apologizes to the horses, who have had a stressful few weeks with the new lights and aren't really being fed enough for repeated cross-country trips. "Neither am I, buddy," he murmurs, and sets a pace that probably won't exhaust Miles' baffling armor. 

Miles's baffling armour is not exhausted, and neither is Miles. They make decent time back to the shuttle.

It's swarming with orcs, of course. "We have better vision than them," Celegorm says at a mile out, "they probably haven't seen us yet. Circle around, figure out if there are Balrogs. If so we're going to have to turn back. If not - Miles, is it likely your shuttle would be damaged by a fight?"

"Possible. Not likely." He closes his faceplate.

"Then I think we should fight, if it's just orcs. It's not going to get any safer, not if the Enemy has any inkling how important you and your equipment are."

"I think the same."

"Balrogs have a very distinctive heat signature. We'll be able to see them unless there's several feet of solid rock in the way. If we head north, and there's nothing from there, I think we're safe."

Miles nods. "What weapons will the orcs be likely to have?"

They have archers, they have axes, they have swords. Everything's poisoned, but you shouldn't have a problem - you don't have any skin showing - for that matter, you can stay back where you're safe. We're just going to ride them down, shoot everything that runs, then kill everything we trampled. Five minutes, probably."

"I have weapons with me that could probably make this process more efficient, but if you expect to be able to handle the orcs easily yourself, I can keep my weapons to myself for now, to limit the information available to the enemy."

"We won't lose anyone doing this, unless there's something I can't see from here or they get off an exceptionally lucky -" the thought accompanies the words, he has a great many memories to share for that concept - "shot. I don't know what the Enemy can see. It might be that if none escape he'll learn nothing; it might be that he can see almost the whole land. He knew we'd arrived, but we had kind of lit a very large fire."

"Then I'll stay back and not do much unless something goes horribly wrong."

There's a Balrog. 

He sees it as soon as they crest the hill; the orcs are clustered around it in a dense mob, presumably so he didn't see it sooner. Turn and run, or dive in anyway, this time nearly certain to lose someone? What are Miles' weapons, and can they possibly make a difference in a fight like this? And will they have a better shot at Miles' shuttle? And what could the Enemy do with it? 

Maglor would call off the cavalry charge. But they've been erring on the side of caution ever since they lose Maitimo, and it's starting to suffocate them.

"We could use help," he says to Miles, in a language the Balrog has hopefully never heard, and then flings himself at it.

Well then.

Time to find out how a Balrog reacts to a plasma bolt.