An interstitial message burned in the corner of his vision, the holographic phos-glyphs casting a jade glow on Trazyn’s death mask. Security glyphs blinked on its message seal.
He opened the message, unfurling it downward like a scroll, absorbing the technical data like the calculation machine he was. ‘What’s this, Sannet?’
Sannet opened an identical alert. ‘Exhibit breach, in the Dawnward Sector. Gallery MXXIII, Thoth subcontinent, coordinates 52.941472, -1.174056.’
‘The hrud burrow ecosystem,’ Trazyn snarled. He conjured a holographic image.
The image was dim in colour, tinged with the green corposant of the chrysoprase projection, but the visuals were crisp and comprehensible. A barrel-shaped container of earth – four thousand cubits wide, and three thousand tall – floated in suspensor fields at the centre of a vast chamber. Long-limbed creatures milled about the top, struggling from holes in its surface.
Trazyn sliced at the hologram with his fingers and it split in two like a cutaway schematic. On the inside of the earthen plug, tunnels wormed their way between vaulted worship chambers and earthen family burrows. Hrud scrambled upward, sensing their moment to escape had come. After all, they had been imprisoned inside hard-light holograms – caught like insects in amber – for at least two millennia. Thoughts frozen at the moment of their acquisition, with only the most astute and neurologically gifted sensing that any time had passed at all. Those races steeped in the empyrean – for whom the tides of the warp were part of their very make-up – tended not to fare as well.

The Infinite and the Divine