“Yes?” My tongue greeted the salmon like a long-lost sibling. I’d worked up a huge appetite.
“You can send a question through the Portal, and someone looks up the answer right away and sends it back.”
“Sure. They support us.”
Gunfire nodded. “Aliens are uncommon. You’ve met, what, fifteen aliens in all the universes you’ve explored?”
“Eighteen.”
“So the alien contact specialists aren’t running from first contact to first contact.” Gunfire raised a hand to his chest and pointed a single finger up. “Aren’t those specialists sitting in a library or a research center near your headquarters, thinking up new ways to communicate with aliens? Studying how past meetings went bad?”
“Sure.”
“They probably have an Alien Alarm. It’s like a fire alarm, except when it goes off everybody grabs thei
