But the federation’s scientists had not anticipated how long this great surge of growth would continue. With the domain war long won, the mighty cosmic expansion continued, at rates unparalleled in the universe’s history. Ultimately, it would last sixty times the age of the universe at its inception, and it would expand the federation’s corner of spacetime by a trillion, times a trillion, times a trillion, times a trillion. Human scientists, detecting the traces of this great burst of “inflation,” the single worst catastrophe in the universe’s long history, would always wonder what had triggered it. Few ever guessed it was the outcome of a runaway accident triggered by war.
As the epochal storm continued the survivors of the federation huddled, folding their wings of spacetime flaws over themselves. When the gale at last passed, the survivors emerged into a new, chill cosmos. So much time had passed that they had changed utterly, and forgotten who they were, where they had come from. But they were heirs of a universe grown impossibly huge—a universe all of ten centimeters across.
Chapter 42
Quin Base shocked Pirius Red.
He was dismayed by the cramped corridors and heaped-up bunks of the barracks, the crowding, the stink of shit and urine and semen, the metallic odors of failing life-support systems. The people swarmed through their cavernous lairs, feeding and sleeping, shouting and wrestling and rutting. The only difference he could see between privates and cadets was the gleaming metallized pupils of the “veterans.” He thought their silvery stares made them seem inhuman, like huge, lithe rats, perhaps.
If he had been faced with hostility in the barracks back at Arches, here he was regarded with undisguised loathing. In fact, the station commander, a stern prosthetic-wearer called Captain Marta, insisted that he and Pila were accompanied by guards wherever they went.
Pila, oddly, didn’t seem disturbed by this squalor. “What did you expect? Pirius, you are a pilot; you are relatively skilled and intelligent, and in battle you would be expected to show individual initiative. The conditions of your upbringing and training reflect that. These cadets are animals to be thrown onto some dismal Rock to dig and fight and die. This is a war of economics, remember. How much do you think it is worth spending on their brief, wretched lives?”
Pirius wondered if she was wearing nose filters.
“You just don’t fit in,” said Enduring Hope.
“Thanks,” said Pirius dryly.
Hope and Pirius Red faced each other across the small room in Quin’s cramped Officer Country that had been commandeered for Pirius’s use. This engineer, who had flown with Pirius Blue aboard the Assimilator’s Claw in a different destiny, was one of the first candidates selected by Pila. Pirius Red had only met Hope from across the courtroom, during the hearing on the magnetar episode.
Hope seemed to regard Red as an inferior version of Blue. It was deeply disconcerting to be known so well by somebody Pirius had never properly met before—known, and judged, and found wanting.