ViraVax by Bill Ransom

right here. Quite a market.”
    “Show me Histology.”
    For the first time she saw Casey’s shield drop, and in that glimpse she tasted fear in his hesitation. Gone in a blink.
    “Why not?” he said. “You’re here.”
    Casey activated the double doorlock, and she followed him through. The doorway became a polished concrete corridor that slanted down thirty paces, then up again thirty. It opened up into one of the five huge bunkers that stretched for a half kilometer, more than a hundred meters underground.
    “It’s like a little city down here,” she remarked.
    “Another country,” Casey grunted.
    She marveled at the deception, the simplicity of camouflage that hinted at none of this from the air. She had already noted that most flights came and went after dark. The landing pad was six levels up and a world away.
    How handy for him.
    Tiers of crates and shipping containers lined the walls and aisleways. Forklifts, cranes and electric tractors filled the air with a hum that bordered on whine. Marte noted the heady scent of ozone in the air. Casey pointed out refrigerated rooms and positive-pressure storage. Inspectors and shipping clerks, all missionaries, wore full gowns and foot coverings. Down syndrome helpers wore loose-fitting, pajama-like clothing. Like their counterparts topside, Level Five’s workers wore colored overalls to match their restricted pathways marked by lines in the floor and by colored lights in the walls.
    Colored lines diverged under the glossy waxed floors to delineate different pathways. The wax made the floor squeak under Marte’s uncovered shoes. The inspector frowned when he heard it, started to gesture with his clipboard. Then he saw that she was a companion of Joshua Casey and nodded politely.
    From somewhere farther back, high-pitched screams.
    Marte’s flesh prickled.
    Casey smiled. “Primates,” he explained. “You might as well see the menagerie.”
    The menagerie took up most of a hundred-meter-long wing of the bunker. Racks, ramps and scaffolding formed a convoluted maze up to the rafters ten meters overhead. Within that maze lived thousands, tens of thousands, of animals.
    “It takes twenty people each shift, around the clock, to handle it,” Casey said. “Still, they receive the Sabbath free, too. As you can see, the Plexiglas partitions are individual bioms. The animals are quite comfortable.”
    “Sure,” Marte snapped, “if they like cages.”
    “Like many humans in this life, they have no choice. They derive what comfort they can and deny the rest.”
    Along the wall stood nine cubicles, three atop three atop three more. Each was fiberglass, about a meter square, with a small hole high in one side.
    What could be in there? she wondered.
    An armed security guard stood at one end of the stack of cubicles.
    “What’s in there?” she asked. “In those boxes.”
    Casey frowned, but it was the frown that she had already learned to recognize as a mock seriousness, at a time when he would deliver a prepared statement.
    “Hot chimps,” he said. “Their infection is stabilized and they’re awaiting . . . ”
    “My God” was her involuntary comment.
    “Do not blaspheme. They are chimps, after all, and will be destroyed when we’ve completed the necessary tests.”
    Marte thought she heard a human voice cry out, but the guard silenced it with a stun butt to the side of the box. She regretted that the box was out of range of her Sidekick’s microscan adapter. She wanted to burst as much of this out as possible, but a single visual frame required as much transmission space as a hundred pages of text.
    What if I never get in here again? Marte wondered.
    Casey must have noted her expression of shock, the direction of her gaze.
    “Quite good at mimicry, aren’t they?” he said. “In the lab they find adopting human mannerisms often brings them extra attention and food from the Innocents. Shall we move along?”
    As Casey took her elbow to escort her back to