Roots (around)

Usage examples of grubs.

An old man scrabbling for grubs was stung by bees until his heart stopped.

Her breath came faster and she fumbled to pour the grubs onto the tray.

She walked briskly back through the chamber of strange animals, realizing halfway through that she still clutched the now-empty box in which the grubs had come.

Below it the Canker flowed through the city, its barges and pleasure boats little grubs of dirty light on the blackness.

The grubs had been a peaceable, innocent starfaring culture for many millions of years until they had run into the machines.

The grubs had expanded into space for arcane reasons of their own which Travelling Fearlessly was not able to explain, except to convey that they had little to do with curiosity or a need for resources.

To survive, the grubs first had to grasp that they were being persecuted.

The grubs appropriated technologies as it suited their needs, usually without bothering to understand them.

The grubs had been sternly admonished when they had asked if the same principles might be extended to instantaneous travel.

Eventually the grubs were pushed back into interstellar space, cowering away from starlight.

So the grubs and their allies-the few that remained-grew intensely paranoid and watchful for the signs of new life.

Curiosity was still something that required an effort of will for them, and it was not until the signs of intelligence around Earth became blatant that the grubs forced themselves to become interested.

Yet, fast and strong as the killing machines were, they had limitations-it might have been more accurate to call them blindspots-which the grubs had carefully documented over the millennia.

The grubs retain a record of every message they would have sent, across all their racial history.

A tiny fragment of the archive, carrying only time-tagged messages between the grubs and a handful of allied species.