Ryland Grace Quotes

Be careful,' says Rocky. 'You are friend now.' 'Thanks,' I say. 'You are friend also.' 'Thank.

Adjust orbit while stupid. Good plan.' I snicker. 'New word: "sarcasm." You say opposite of true meaning to make point. Sarcasm.

You observe, question?' he asks again. 'No.' 'Observe.' 'You want me to observe you sleep?' 'Yes. Want want want.' Through unspoken agreement, a tripled word means extreme emphasis. 'Why?' 'I sleep better if you observe.

Yes!' I press my knuckles against the tunnel wall. 'Fist-bump!' 'What, question?' I rap the tunnel again. 'This. Do this.' He emulates my gesture against the wall opposite my hand. 'Celebration!' I say. 'Celebration!

I was only off by one percent,' I grumble. 'You talk to you, question?' 'Yes! I'm talking to me.' 'Humans are unusual.' 'Yes,' I say.

It's a simple idea, but also stupid. Thing is, when stupid ideas work, they become genius ideas. We'll see which way this one falls.

I'm all wired up, but if I don't go to sleep soon, Rocky will start hassling me. Sheesh- you almost ruin a mission one time and all of a sudden you have an alien-enforced bedtime.

I've gone from "sole-surviving space explorer" to "guy with wacky new roommate." It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Settled.' He puts his claw against the divider. 'Fist my bump.' I laugh and put my knuckles against the xenonite. 'Fist-bump. It's just "fist-bump."' 'Understand.

You sleep. Human no function well after no sleep. EVA dangerous. Sleep first. EVA next.' I roll my eyes. 'All right, all right.' He points back to my bunk. 'Sleep.' 'Yes, Mom.' 'Sarcasm. You sleep. I watch.

I guess this is it,' I say. 'It is time, ' he says. 'We go save homeworlds now.' 'Yeah.' 'Your face is leaking.' I wipe my eyes. 'Human thing. Don't worry about it.' 'Understand.' He pushes himself along to the airlock door. He opens it and pauses there. 'Goodbye, friend Grace.' I wave meekly. 'Goodbye, friend Rocky.

Your ship has more science that my ship. Better science. I bring my things in to your ship. Release tunnel. You make your ship spin for science. You and me science how to kill Astrophage together. Save Earth. Save Erid. This is good plan, question?

Rocky cocks his carapace. 'Hey, your face is leaking! I haven't seen that in a long-ass time! Remind me- does that mean you're happy or sad? 'Cause it can mean either one, right?' 'I'm happy, of course!' I sob. 'Yeah. I thought so. Just checking.' He holds a balled claw against the xenonite. 'Is this a fist-bump situation?' I press my knuckles to the xenonite as well. 'This is a monumentally epic fist-bump situation.

I don't have time for this. I have an alien thingy to catch.

You told me not to talk about that in polite company.' 'I'm not polite company, my friend!

Oh thank God. I can't imagine explaining "sleep" to someone who has never heard of it. Hey, I'm going to fall unconscious and hallucinate for a while. By the way, I spend a third of my time doing this. And if I can't do it for a while, I go insane and eventually die. No need for concern.

I don't want to look dumb in front of the aliens. Because they're surely watching me right now. Probably counting my limbs, noting my size, figuring out what part they should eat first. Whatever.

Humans spent thousands of years looking up at the stars and wondering what was out there. You guys never saw stars at all but you still worked space travel. What an amazing people you Eridians must be. Scientific geniuses.' The knot in the tape comes loose, recoils wildly, and smacks Rocky's hand. He shakes the affected hand in pain for a moment, then continues messing with the tape measure. 'Yeah, you're definitely a scientist.

Yes. I have much Astrophage. My ship was more efficient than planned on trip here. You can have two million kilograms.' I fall back in to my seat. I pant. I almost hyperventilate. My eyes well up. 'Oh my God...' 'No understand.' I wipe away tears. 'You are okay, question?' 'Yes!' I sob. 'Yes, I'm okay. Thank you! Thank you thank you!' 'I am happy. You no die. Let's save planets!' I break down, crying tears of joy. I'm going to live!

Right now, we're soft. You, me, the whole Western world. We're the result of growing up in unprecedented comfort and stability. It's the kids of today that'll have to make the world of tomorrow work. And they're going to inherit a mess.

Ryland Grace?” said a woman’s voice. I looked up with a start. I hadn’t heard her come in. She looked to be in her mid-forties, wearing a well-tailored business suit. She carried a briefcase. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Can I help you with something?

I'm on a suicide mission. John, Paul, George, and Ringo get to go home, but my long and winding road ends here. I must have known all this when I volunteered. But to my amnesia-riddled brain this is new information. I'm going to die out here. And I'm going to die alone.

Hey. What's your ship's name, anyway?' 'Blip-A.' 'No, I mean. What do you call it?' 'Ship.' 'Your ship has no name?' 'Why would ship have name, question?' 'I shrugged. 'Ships have names.' He points to my pilot's seat. 'What is name of you chair, question?' 'It doesn't have a name.' 'Why does ship have name but chair no have name, question?' 'Never mind. Your ship is the Blip-A.' 'That is what I said. Flash in ten seconds.' 'Copy.

You have a language!' I say. 'How do you have a language? You don't have a mouth!' '

I feel like Sherlock Holmes. All I saw was "nothing," and I drew a bunch of conclusions! Conclusions that are widely speculative and with nothing to prove them, but conclusions!

Knock-knock-knock. No, that's not creepy at all. Being in a spaceship twelve light-years from home and having someone knock on the door is totally normal.

I know,' he says, titling his carapace in what I've come to realise is a smile.

Mechanical suffocation, it’s called. It’s how boa constrictors kill their prey. What an odd thing to think as my last thought. Sorry, Earth, I think. There. Much better last thought.

Sample device radio signal strong.' Rocky says. 'Getting closer. Be ready.' 'I'm ready.' 'Be very ready.' 'I am very ready. Be calm.' 'Am calm. You be calm.' 'No, you be cal- wait. I see the sampler!

,,, It's been a hard day. Night. Whatever. A hard day's night.' I lie back in the bunk, and pull the blanket over me. 'That sentence make no sense.' 'It's an Earth saying. From a song.' I close my eyes and mumble. '...and I've been working like a dog...

Rocky!' A crackle. My ears perk up. 'Rocky?!' 'Grace, question?' 'Yes!' I've never been so happy to hear a few musical notes! 'Yeah, buddy! It's me!' 'You are here, question?!' his voice is so high-pitched I can barely understand him. But I understand Eridian pretty well now. 'Yes! I'm here!' 'You are...' he squeaks. 'You...' he squeaks again. 'You are here!' 'Yes! Set up the airlock tunnel!' 'Warning! Taumoeba-82.5 is-' 'I know! I know. It can get through xeonite. That's why I'm here. I knew you'd be in trouble.' 'You save me!' 'Yes. I caught the Taumoeba in time. I still have fuel. Set up the tunnel. I'm taking you to Erid.' 'You save me and you save Erid!' he squeaks. 'Set up the damn tunnel!' 'Get back in you ship! Unless you want to look at tunnel from outside!' 'Oh, right!

You have a language!' I say. 'How do you have a language? You don't have a mouth!' '♫♫♪,' Rocky explains. Thinking rationally, you can't make spaceships without a civilisation and you can't have civilisation without being able to communicate. So of course they have a language.

I look to Rocky for approval. He had no face and thus no facial expressions. He just floats there, watching me. Well, not watching... no eyes. Actually, wait. How does he know what I'm doing? He clearly knows- he waved and stuff. He must have eyes somewhere. I probably just don't recognise them.

Good good. Enough talk. Check breeder tanks, please.' 'Yeah, yeah. Let me get some water first.' He bounces and skitters down his tube to the lab. 'Why humans need water so much, question? Inefficient life-forms!' ... 'Eiridians need water too, you know.' 'We keep inside. Closed system. Some inefficiencies inside, but we get all water we need from food. Humans leak! Gross!' I laugh as I float in to the lab where Rocky is waiting. 'On Earth, we have a scary, deadly creature called a spider. You look like one of those, just so you know.' 'Good. Proud. I am scary space monster. You are leaky space blob.

He waves to me with a free arm. He knows one human greeting and by golly he plans to use it. I wave back. He waves again. I shake my head. No more waving. He pivots his "shoulders" to rotate his carapace back and forth. He "shook his head" inasmuch as he could. I wonder how we're going to break out of this game of "Eridian See Eridian Do," but he takes care of that for me.

I roll around to see Rocky hovering over me. Not in his compartment. He's in the control room! He has slashed my restraints and pulled the chair free. He shoves it to the side. He stands over me, wobbling. I can feel the heat radiating from his body just inches away. Smoke billows out of the radiator slits atop his carapace. His knees buckle and he collapses on to the screen next to me, destroying it. The LCD unit blacks out and the plastic bezel melts. I see a trail of smoke leading up the tunnel to the lab and beyond. 'Rocky!' What have you done?' The crazy bastard must have used the large airlock in the dormitory! He came in to my partition to save me. And he'll die because of it! He shivers and folds his legs under himself. 'Save... Earth... save... Erid...' he quavers. Then he slumps down. 'Rocky!' I grab his carapace without thinking. It's like putting my hands on a burner. I jerk away. 'Rocky... no...' But he is motionless.

There is an object blocking my view of the Petrova line. It’s right next to my ship. Maybe a few hundred meters away. It’s roughly triangle-shaped and it has gable-like protrusions along its hull. Yes. I said hull. It's not an asteroid- the lines are too smooth; too straight. This object was made. Fabricated. Constructed. Shapes like that don't occur in nature. It's a ship. Another ship. There's another ship in this system with me. Those flashes of light- those were its engines. It's Astrophage-powered. Just like the Hail Mary. But the design, the shape- it's nothing like any spacecraft I've ever seen. The whole thing is made of huge, flat surfaces- the worst possible way to make a pressure vessel. No one in their right mind would make a ship that shape. No one on Earth would, anyway. I blink a few times at what I'm seeing. I gulp. This... this is an alien spacecraft. Made by aliens. Aliens intelligent enough to make a spacecraft. Humanity isn't alone in the universe. And I've just met our neighbours. 'Holy fucking shit!

That's an alien. I just saw an alien. Not just an alien ship. An alien being. I mean- just his claw- er... hand. But yeah. Well, I say "his hand", but maybe it's her hand. Or some other pronoun I don't have a word for. They might have seventeen biological sexes, for all I know. Or none. No one ever talks about the really hard parts of first contact with intelligent alien life: pronouns. I'm going to go with "he" for now, because it just seems rude to call a thinking being "it." Also, until I hear otherwise, his name is Rocky.

Rocky admonished me for leaving the sample at (human) room temperature for so long. He had a lot to say on that subject, actually. We had to add “reckless,” “idiot,” “foolish,” and “irresponsible” to our shared vocabulary just so he could fully express his opinion on the matter. There was another word he threw around a lot, but he declined to tell me what it meant. Three days off the painkillers and I'm a lot smarter than I was. At least he understands that much- I wasn't just some stupid human. I was a human with enhanced stupidity.

...All the environmental problems we have from climate change? That happened because the world's average temperature went up one and a half degrees That's it. Just one and a half degrees.' ... 'Earth's temperature could drop ten to fifteen degrees.' 'What'll happen?' Luther asked. 'It'll be bad. Very bad. A lot of animals- entire species- will die out because their habitats are too cold. The ocean water will cool down, too, and it might cause an entire food-chain collapse. So even things that could survive the lower temperatures will starve to death because the things they eat all die off.

The hex wall is gone- it's been replaced by a solid wall of clear material. And on the other side of that wall is Rocky. He's a spider. A big-assed spider. I turn to flee. But my rational brain takes over. 'Easy... easy... they're friendly.' I say to myself. I turn back and take in the scene. Rocky is smaller than a human. He's about the size of a Labrador. He has five legs radiating out from a central carapace-looking thing. The carapace, which is roughly a pentagon, is 18 inches across and half as thick. I don't see eyes or a face anywhere. Each leg has a joint in the middle- I'll call it an elbow. Each leg (or should I say arm?) ends in a hand. So he's got five hands. Each hand has those triangular fingers I got a good look at last time. Looks like all five hands are the same. I don't see any "front" or "back" to him. He appears to be pentagonally symmetrical. He wears clothing. The legs are bare, showing the rocklike skin, but there's cloth on the carapace. Sort of like a shirt with five armholes. I don't know what the shirt is made of but it looks thicker than typical human clothing. It's a dull greenish-brown, and inconsistently shaded. The top of the shirt has a large open hole. Like where the neck goes on a human's t-shirt. This hole is smaller than the carapace/ So he must have to put that shirt on by pulling it downward and sliding the arms through their respective holes. Again, like a human's shirt. But there's no neck or head to go through that hole on top- just a hard-looking rocky pentagon that sticks up a little bit from the crusty skin.

This is waste of time. Also waste of my food.' 'I need to know if I can eat your food.' 'Eat your own food.' 'I've only got a few months of real food left. You have enough aboard your ship to feed a crew of twenty-three Eridians for years. Erid life and Earth life use the same proteins. Maybe I can eat your food.' 'Why you say "real food", question? What is non-real food, question?' I checked the readout again. Why does Eridian food have so many heavy metals in it? 'Real food is food that tastes good. Food that's fun to eat.' 'You have not-fun food, question?' 'Yeah. Coma slurry. The ship fed it to me during the trip here. I have enough to last me almost four years.' 'Eat that.' 'It tastes bad.' 'Food experience not that important.' 'Hey,' I point at him. 'To humans, food experience is very important.' 'Humans strange.' I point at the spectrometer readout screen. 'Why does Eridian food have thallium in it?' 'Healthy.' 'Thallium kills humans!' 'Then eat human food.' 'Ugh.

This is happy! Your face opening is in sad mode. Why, question?' 'Going to be a long trip and I'll be all alone.' ... 'You will miss me, question? I will miss you. You are friend.' 'Yeah. I'm going to miss you.' I take another swig of vodka. 'You're my friend. Heck, you're my best friend. And pretty soon we're going to say goodbye forever.' He two tapped gloved claws together. They made a muffled sound instead of the usual click that comes along with the dismissive gesture. 'Not forever. We save planets. Then we have Astrophage technology. Visit each other.' I give a wry smile. 'Can we do all that within fifty Earth years? 'Probably not. Why so fast, question?' 'I only have fifty years or so left to live. Human's don't'- I hiccup- 'don't live long, remember?' 'Oh.' He's quiet for a moment. 'So we enjoy remaining time together, then go save planets. Then we are heroes!' 'Yeah!' I straighten up. I'm a little dizzy now. I've never been much of a drinker, and I'm hitting this vodka harder than I should. 'We're the moss imporn't people in the gal'xy! We're awesome!' He grabs a nearby wrench and raises it in one of his hands. 'To us!' I raise the vodka. 'To ush!

Suddenly, a rock hits the other side of the hex. It stays there. It's just a few inches away from me. It's roughly triangular, kind of a dark brown, and has rough, jagged edges. Like you might see on the tip of a spear from a caveman. Have I met spacefaring cavemen? Stop being stupid, Ryland. Why did they put a rock there? And is it sticky? Are they trying to block my view? If so, they're doing a terrible job. The little triangle is only a couple of inches wide at the thickest point and the hex is a good 8 inches across. And it gets sillier. Now the rock is bending at articulated joints, and there are two similar rocks that do the same thing, and there's a larger rock attached to them that- That's not a rock. It's a claw! It's a claw with three fingers! ... The alien's claw-er... I'll call it a hand. That's less scary. The alien's hand has three triangular fingers, each one with articulation points. Knuckles, I guess. They can close up in to a raindrop shape of widen out to a sort of three-legged starfish. The skin is weird. It looks like brownish-black rock. It's irregular and bumpy, like someone carved the hand out of granite and hasn't gotten around to smoothing it out yet. Natural armour, maybe? Like a turtle shell, but less organised? There's an arm, too. I can barely see it from this angle, no matter how hard I stupidly press my face in to the Hot Wall of Pain. But there's definitely an arm leading away from the hand. I mean, there'd have to be, right? Not just a magic floating hand.

Good good,' he says. 'I make sure my people take good care of you. They will make Astrophage maybe for you to go home!' 'Yeah...' I say. 'About that... I'm not going home. The beetles will save Earth. But I won't ever see it again.' His joyous bouncing stops. 'Why, question?' 'I don't have enough food. After I take you back to Erid, I will die.' 'You... you can no die.' His voice gets low. 'I no let you die. We send you home. Erid will be grateful. You save everyone. We do everything to save you.' 'There's nothing you can do,' I say. 'There's no food. I have enough to last until we get to Erid and then a few months more. Even if your government gave me the Astrophage to get home, I wouldn't survive the trip.' 'Eat Erid food. We evolve from same life. We use same proteins. Same chemicals. Same sugars. Must work!' 'No, I can't eat your food, remember?' 'You say is bad for you. We find out.' I hold up my hands. 'It's not just bad for me. It will kill me. Your whole ecology uses heavy metals all over the place. Most of them are toxic to me. I'd die immediately.' He trembles. 'No. You can no die. You are friend.' I float closer to the divider wall and talk softly. 'It's okay. I made my decision. This is the only way to save both of our worlds.' He backs away. 'Then you go home. Go home now. I wait here. Erid maybe send another ship someday.' 'That's ridiculous. Do you really want to risk the survival of your entire species on that guess?' He's silent for a few moments and finally answers. 'No.

THE PHOENIX PACK: Trey Coleman Alpha Taryn Warner Alpha Dante Beta Tao Head Enforcer Dominic Enforcer Marcus Enforcer Patrick “Trick” Enforcer Ryan Enforcer Greta Trey’s grandmother Grace Mated to Rhett Rhett Mated to Grace Lydia Mated to Cam Cam Mated to Lydia Kirk Brock’s son Selma Subordinate Brock Kirk’s father Hope Subordinate Louisa Trey’s mother, deceased NOTABLE CHARACTERS FROM THE ONYX PACK: Lance Warner Alpha, father of Taryn Cecilia Warner Mother of Taryn, deceased Shaya Critchley Friend of Taryn Caleb Friend of Taryn Perry Enforcer Oscar Enforcer Joseph “Joey” Winters Died when only nine, believed to be Taryn’s mate Brodie Nicole Ashley Richie NOTABLE CHARACTERS FROM THE BJORN PACK: Rick Coleman Previous Alpha, father of Trey, deceased Darryl Coleman New Alpha, uncle of Trey Josh Brother of Dante Summer Died as a baby, believed to be Trey’s mate Viv Mother of Summer Martin NOTABLE CHARACTERS FROM THE RYLAND PACK: Nick Axton Alpha Don Uncle of Taryn Derren Nick’s bodyguard Glory OTHER CHARACTERS: Roscoe Weston Alpha wolf shifter who attempts to claim Taryn Dean Milton Mediator