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“Lien” was just a minor functionary, a nondescript bureaucrat.
    She walked up the wooden steps of the administrator’s headquarters. Each day when she reported for work, Enva found it amusing that the Tehila colonists called this a “mansion.” On the remote world, they had nothing else to compare it to.
    Tehila’s primary city had been established around the spaceport where regular shuttles took off for the stringline terminus ring in orbit. Previously, trade had flowed along the stringline to the Sonjeera hub, but General Adolphus had astonished them all by laying down a new Deep Zone stringline network that connected the frontier planets before he unilaterally declared a war of independence against Diadem Michella Duchenet.
    Inside the Tehila offices, minor functionaries milled about, taking care of clerical emergencies, filling out forms, filing documents, performing rote jobs. Her office mate was bent over her desk in consternation. Maruni Li was easily flustered and just as easily manipulated. Middle-aged with salt-and-pepper hair, she had already met or exceeded her life’s minimal ambitions. Many bland workers just like Maruni had served Enva on Orsini: a government couldn’t function without them.
    A man paced the office, presenting a new report full of images. Enva had worked with him before, but she wasn’t quite clear on his name or responsibilities. He was flustered about some problem at the Tehila spaceport.
    Maruni’s face melted with relief when she saw Enva. “Good, you can help us with this. We don’t want to overreact, but no one seems to know the best solution.”
    â€œI’ll try to help, but first I need to know what the problem is.”
    â€œIt’s the walumps,” said the man who had brought in the new documents. “Last night they erected six more mud huts right on the edge of the spaceport.”
    Enva frowned. “You’d think the noise of landings and takeoffs would bother them.”
    â€œI doubt anything bothers them,” Maruni said.
    The innocuous and oblivious herd creatures were nicknamed “walumps”—short for “walking lumps,” which was an apt description, Enva thought. Each of the creatures had spindly legs and arms, rounded bodies like misshapen boulders, and a head that tucked down into its main body like a turtle’s. Walumps lived together in herds, or colonies, or hives—no one could quite tell. The passive creatures were completely indifferent to the human colonists.
    Attempts to communicate with the walumps had failed to evoke any kind of response—not anger, nor fear, nor defensiveness. They built their mud huts wherever they liked. They spoke with one another in low murmurs, but showed no reaction whenever a human addressed them. Because they cooperated with one another, built structures, and obviously communicated, they were classed as intelligent, but they were also an enigma.
    Enva scanned the reports, saw that a group of the creatures had erected numerous rounded huts, as if they had decided the edge of a spaceport was just the perfect place for a new settlement. “Leave them alone, so long as they don’t get in the way of space traffic. But if they build huts that encroach on our operations, then use dozers to knock them down.”
    â€œThat’s what I was going to suggest,” said Maruni Li. Beside her, the man with the report muttered and agreed, seemingly glad to have someone offer the suggestion, which would let them point fingers back at Enva should anything go wrong. She could hold her own regardless.
    Much of her clerical work involved claims filed by refugees from the ruined planet of Candela. After asteroids destroyed Candela, hundreds of thousands of refugees had spread out to any other Deezee world that would take them. Because Tehila had so much unclaimed land, many refugees had come here.
    The original Tehila colonists did not like the