Astra Grantley
Astra Grantley is the portal bonded to Leila Grantley, the fifth Guardian of Bixbus, and the last of the five to appear, in August 2018. From 2019 it stood within Vault B of the Bixbus Portal Complex, the most strictly controlled hall, carrying medical supplies, intelligence material, and families joining relatives already in Bixbus. Its crews called it the Mercy Gate.
The Last of the Five
Astra Grantley is the portal bonded to Leila Grantley, who became the fifth Guardian of Bixbus in August 2018, in the days around the Killerton agreement she brokered in San Francisco. It was the last of the five Bixbus portals to appear, on the plain beside the Bixbus River close to the four already standing there. Like Sanctum Lukei and Crux Beatrix, it is a translucent upright plane roughly three metres wide and five metres high.
People and Medicine
From the start, much of what came through Astra Grantley was people. Leila brought families through to join relatives already in Bixbus, along with medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and material whose contents were never explained to the settlers who unloaded it.
On 13 November 2018 she opened it in the hallway of a flat in Oulu, Finland, and brought Leena Heikki through with two suitcases to join her husband, Aldo. The portal set Leena down on open ground still scattered with crates and half-built fence posts, and Leila was gone again within minutes. Fifteen months later, on 5 February 2020, she opened it in the Drake family house in Ballard, Seattle, and brought Jenna and Ethan Drake through to their father. By then the ground had become Vault B, and the Drakes waited at its yellow line before being taken below.
Vault B
The hall built around Astra Grantley from January 2019 was lettered Vault B, and it became the most strictly controlled of the five. It was the only hall fitted with an enforced biohazard lockdown system, able to seal its threshold and isolate the hall entirely if contamination protocols required it. Its crews were the most heavily vetted in the Complex. When U2 opened beneath it in October 2019, much of that level's medical storage was given over to the supplies arriving through Astra.
The crews of Vault B called it the Mercy Gate. The name came from the medicine and the families, and it was used with a certain irony by those who also knew what else passed through its threshold under seal.
Below Ground
From 2019 the people Astra Grantley brought into Bixbus were walked down its ramp into the Undercroft within minutes of arriving, and after October 2023 they were carried by the Underway to Unity Plaza without ever seeing the hall they had entered. Many of the families Leila brought through never learned the name of the portal that had brought them.
