Shiro sighs and shakes his head, but there's a hint of fondness in his expression that he can't quite conceal. "Keith..." 

He straightens. "Alright. Clearly I've missed a lot. What else has the Garrison been doing—and why are we here and not in a Garrison quarantine facility?" 

"So - the Garrison completely covered up what happened with the Orfeo. They cut the video broadcast right before you landed, claimed it was probably just a failure of communications equipment, and then over a month of updates the story changed from that to 'something is wrong, we are investigating and crewing a rescue mission' to 'we have managed to get more information, and tragically the Orfeo crashed into Kerberos, with no survivors'. And -"

she takes a breath, trying not to sound too angry.

"I didn't believe them. Kes and I were watching the landing with Nuadh - xi'd already told us that the public broadcasts were on a delay. And we thought - why cut the broadcast then? The odds of an equipment failure right before a smooth touchdown seemed stupidly high, compared to - them cutting it off as soon as something happened in their live feed. And then their actual story was even less convincing, for people following the broadcast closely! The landing was going great, to crash from when the cutoff point you would have had to manually disengage at least one of safety systems, which - you wouldn't do." 

(Some of this explanation sounds a bit... recited, as though Ami had spent a lot of time on forums where people have argued back and forth on this kind of thing, perhaps to exhaustion!)

"I didn't see any other way of finding out what happened to Matty besides going to the Garrison and getting the info from them directly. So I - got some help passing the entrance exams and transferred in. And then I met Magini, and -"

she looks at Magini to see if the other girl wants to explain her part in this.

headshake

"- about 2 months ago, the Garrison started hiring linguists. Like, a lot of them, and especially ones specializing in signal analysis. Which - you only do if you have a signal to analyze, right?"

"Magini is a genius and does occasional part-time work doing tech repairs for the Garrison. When I asked her for her help to try and figure out what was going on, she built a backdoor into the main commsatt array out of a pair of earrings that would sample incoming communication, store it to a buffer, and then send it to her phone when she walked by."

"She analyzed the signal data, plotted it next to where the dishes were pointing at the time, and - well, there was a cluster of signals coming from Jupiter that were stronger than the signal from the Mars base, despite the distance, and had totally unrecognizable metadata. Which meant it had to be - some non-Garrison ships communicating with each other."

"We kept tracking the source (...Magini did all the work, I couldn't have done any of this), and - once it was approaching earth and the Garrison still hadn't made any kind of public announcement at all, we - borrowed a telescope from the astronomy warehouse to just look at what we were pretty sure was an alien ship. And - the 3 of us were watching that when your pod launched from it, and Keith drove us to the landing point."

"And - we're here and not with the Garrison because - I was afraid that if they took you, Keith and I would never see you again? And - I - "

she stifles a sob, and shakes her head.

Magini is feeling a lot of things right now, but the safest and most comfortable one is curiosity. There's a lot she wants to know about what's going on here!

After a few moments of silence indicate that nobody has an immediate follow-up to Ami's explanation, she raises her hand.

(Then she remembers she's not in class, so she awkwardly puts it back down.)

 "Shiro, I know you said you don't remember how you got on the ship we found you in, but - what's the last thing you do remember? Do you know why the aliens are here?" 

Shiro frowns in concentration as he tries to dredge up the memories. 

"They're—searching for something? A weapon, I think. They called it...'Voltron'. Or 'the blue lion', they said that a lot too. I'm not sure if they're the same thing." His metal fist clenches and unclenches. "All I know is that they think it's somewhere on Earth, and whatever it is, we can't let them have it. We need to find it before they do." 

"Voltron... Blue Lion... some kind of alien weapon?" 

She looks around at the others, not really sure what to make of any of this.

"...huh." 

"Keith?" Shiro prompts. "Do you have something that might help?" 

Keith looks a bit embarrassed. "...this is gonna look, uh. A little crazy, I guess, but aliens are real, so..." 

He crosses the room and pulls down a big sheet that's been covering one wall.

Behind it is a giant red-string conspiracy board. He's taken dozens of pictures and rubbings of the blue lion carvings and paintings in the caves over the last month or two, and pinned them up around a map of the Grand Canyon region, with pins marking where each one was taken. Around and over them are constellations of sticky notes scrawled with theories and commentary. 

!!!

Magini uncurls and pops upright to go peer at the board in obvious delight, trying to drink in the information contained within.

Ami, on the other hand, is focusing on the map and connecting some dots.

"Okay, so if we assume that Keith found this buried alien weapon (or a major clue to where it is hidden, at least) in this cave system... It can't just be a coincidence that this blue lion is within 50 miles of the spot that the Garrison relocated their headquarters to 20 years ago, right?"

"Less than twenty years," Keith corrects with a frown. "I was a little kid. Too little to remember it, though." 

"Yeah, it was around 14—no, 15 years ago, now, so you'd have been 2 or 3," Shiro confirms absently, coming over to look at the conspiracy board. "You think these might be clues to the blue lion the Galra are looking for? Any idea where they lead to?" 

Magini points at the spot on the map where several red lines converge.

"If I'm understanding Keith's notes right... it looks like the biggest set of these markings is in this cave system here?"

Keith nods. "There are a few scattered all over the area, but that set of caves is full of 'em." 

"Then that seems like a good place to start. I'll go to the Garrison in the morning, get them to send out a search team—" 

"-Um. If we want to make sure the Galra don't get the blue lion, I don't think it makes sense to go to the Garrison with this, since they're probably collaborating with the Galra?"

"...what?" 

She looks confused.

"The Galra captured the crew of the Orfeo and presumably have spent the last year searching the entire solar system for the blue lion, right? Based on the data Magini gathered, they've spent the last 3 months finishing an inspection of every moon of Jupiter, most major asteroids, and Mars - it seems reasonable to assume that before we started looking into this, they were checking the outer parts of the system."

"And - in that same timespan, the Garrison - lied about what happened to the Orfeo, secretly hired a bunch of linguists to figure out their language, and then covered up the presence of a vastly-more-advanced alien race, including while it was in orbit of their base on Mars."

"If the Galra demand that the Garrison hand over the blue lion, do you really think they could object? I don't know much about alien spaceships, but that thing is huge, and if they're here to look for a weapon, I doubt their ships are unarmed..." 

"...A ship that big wouldn't even need weapons", Magini adds quietly. "It could just... drop scrap metal on us."

Shiro is frowning. 

"I can't speak for what the Garrison has been doing this past year while I was a prisoner, but I'd be surprised if they knew aliens existed when they sent me and my crew out to Kerberos, and I'd be equally surprised if they've been voluntarily working with the aliens who captured us. I can see them covering it up just to avoid a mass panic—which there would be, if the public knew what the Galra are like and what they're capable of." 

"- I'm not saying they sent you there knowing this would happen, or even that they want to be working with the Galra? Just - they might not have much of a choice? If the Galra demand their help finding the blue lion, it doesn't really seem like the Garrison could resist, right?"