Today, he's come further north and east than usual, skirting the southern lip of the Grand Canyon. He and Shiro never came up this way because it's private land, but he's finding it harder and harder to care about that sort of thing. If he's caught, at least someone will acknowledge that he exists. 

...his bike's starting to get low on charge. He could just head home, but instead, on some unknown impulse, he parks it near a trailhead and sets up the portable solar panel. He can explore on foot while it's charging. 

The trail down into the canyon is completely unmarked, with barely any signs of human passage. 

That is, until he gets to the caves. There are dozens of cave mouths on both sides of the river, all different shapes and sizes and heights with no two alike. Some are just little nooks, while others are deep caves that wind away into darkness—but not before giving him a glimpse of the walls, covered in carvings. 

When he was a kid, they went on a school trip to see some Native American rock carvings. They just looked like weathered rocks, until the guide pointed them out, tracing the outlines with her finger in the air above them, and then you could sort of see where the lines were meant to be if you squinted. It was a bit of an anticlimax. 

These are different. They're bold, cut deep, and they've clearly been sheltered from the elements down here in this little valley. Humanoid figures, geometric shapes, and other, stranger things stand out stark and clear on the cave walls. Deeper in, there are paintings, too: people and animals, the pigments still bright hundreds or thousands of years after they were laid down. 

Far too soon, the light starts to go from the canyon as the late afternoon sun sinks lower in the sky, and he has to leave. 

He'll come back tomorrow with a camera. And a flashlight. 

There's a distinctive splash pattern at the shore on the way to where his bike was parked, as though someone with a much smaller vehicle was leaving in a hurry.

Magini walks past her eavesdropping earring on the way to and from an advanced comms class she has almost every day, so it isn't long before she has enough data to start doing basic signal analysis. She'd warned Ami that this is not at all her specialty, but she quickly discovers it really doesn't need to be, for this.

When next she sees Ami, she has a gleam in her eyes and some ✨graphs✨. 

She starts by showing off a group of signals from the lunar colony - strong, directed bursts, obviously encrypted but of about the same duration each day, while the moon is in the dish's direct path. These are status check-ins - they've sat in on them in class before, so she knows that they happen daily, are short, and use this dish. (There's much weaker signals, getting picked up the entire time the moon points at the dish - local comm systems on Luna base that the dish is storng enough to pick up, Magini explains quickly).

Next set: the same, but for Mars. Looks very similar - the signals are weaker (Mars is further away), and the duration of the local chatter signals is shorter (Mars is in the dish's cone for less time), but otherwise it's the same thing. She skips through them quickly.

And then she gets to the part she's clearly been dying to tell Ami about the whole time.

"So. Jupiter. Does not have an established space base, or, uh, anything that should be broadcasting radio signals at all. But when the dish faces it -"

These graphs don't look anything like the ones before. Magini starts by pointing out that explains that the signal strengths here are just wrong, for a static installation. They look more like - multiple broadcasting sources, moving between the gas giant's many moons, one about as loud as the Mars base, the others almost too faint to pick up at all. And the signals themselves... even with her extremely limited signal analysis toolkit, it's obvious to Magini that these are just... different. Almost certainly what they're hiring linguists for.

Aliens. In the solar system. Doing ?something? at Jupiter.

Ami - looks more serious and concentrated than Magini has ever seen her, actually. It's pretty intense!

"Okay. They're at Jupiter now... How long have they been in the system? do we have any way to tell? - not directly, obviously, since we only started collecting data a few days ago. We can assume the Garrison has been picking this up for at least a few weeks, since they've had time to start hiring linguists..."

-stars. Magini knew this was really important to her friend, for whatever reason (she didn't pry. People don't like it when you pry!), but, dang, she was hoping for a bit more... excitement?

She thinks about the other girl's question, for a bit.

"Well... it would depend on what they were doing and where? Like - " she pulls up a model of the solar system, draws a line between Earth and Jupiter, and slides time back and forth to show how the distance between the 2 planets has been changing.

"Okay, so we're closer to Jupiter now than we have been for most of the year. And we can hear the big shi-radio source fine now, but 2 months ago it probably would have been pretty weak, hard to distinguish from noise if you weren't looking for it, and - " scroll scroll back in time "around, like, 4 months ago, it would have been impossible. The sun would have been in the way."

Ami nods seriously. "And if they'd been further out... it would be too far away to pick up anything, right?"

When Magini nods, she continues.

"Then it has to be this. This is what happened to the Orfeo, why they suddenly cut the broadcast and then cancelled the rescue mission. It wasn't an equipment failure - they knew. It was aliens."

"Wait, you think the Orfeo was destroyed by aliens? And that the Garrison just... lied to everyone about it? That's -" 

In a jolt, she remembers the haunted look on Keith's face, the day after the initial announcement. How desperate he'd looked, in that video of him being dragged off.

She has to tell him. He deserves to know.

Ami can tell something just occurred to Magini. "What is it? Are we missing something?"

"No, just... My old lab partner, Keith. I think he was really close to someone on that ship. The pilot, maybe? I forget his nam-" 

    "Shirogane Takashi", Ami supplies automatically.

"oh! Yeah, Shiro. Keith got expelled after they blamed Shiro for the crash, he refused to believe it, got into a fight with Commander Iverson."

She fidgets miserably. "I really want to tell him. He deserves to know."

Ami nods, slowly. "...Yeah. He does. Be careful, but - you can tell him."

She stands up, shakily. "I need to get going, I'm already late for class. Thank you so much, Magini. Your help with this means the world to me." 

Keith gets a secured message!

hey, so.

stars. i know this sounds stupid. but I've been looking into it with a friend, and we got limited access to the Garrison comm dishes, and -

...Well, we think that they lied about the Orfeo. Because we're pretty sure there are aliens in the solar system, and they know, we only know because we're piggybacking their dish, and they're lying about that. And the aliens easily could have been in the system for a year. Could have been at Kerberos, last December. Could have -

Anyways. I know you didn't like me much, but - you deserve to know the truth. Sorry.

-Magini

Message sent, Magini goes to read more about the Orfeo, and -

"Matthew Glass, 24, survived by his father and two younger siblings." 

Oh. 

Well. 

At least Ami likes Magini enough to let her be useful. She appreciates that. 

She just thought-

Keith leaves her on read for most of an hour before sending:

I don't dislike you

thanks

!!!

Oh! No problem - want me to let you know if we find anything else out? 

What the hell is he meant to do with this information? He can barely even think about that, his brain too full of Shiro Shiro Shiro—

But. 

you think they might be alive? 

Huh. What does she think?

There's a pause, and then.

...I don't think it's likely? But maybe, yeah. There's too much we don't know.

...Garrison command would probably have a better idea, but. They're obviously not talking.

I bet Iverson knew. shoulda punched him harder

she giggles, at that.

You got him pretty good already! Did you know he's still wearing an eyepatch?

holy shit. maybe I did punch him hard enough

Yeah. 

I wish they would just tell us what's going on. You and Ami deserve better than this. 

...is he supposed to know who that is???

who's Ami