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?"