Crux Beatrix
Crux Beatrix is the second of the five Bixbus portals. It appeared after Jarod James became a Guardian and was shared by Beatrix Cramer and Jarod until his own portal opened, after which it answered to Beatrix alone. From 2019 it stood within Vault C of the Bixbus Portal Complex, the most heavily shielded hall, and its crews called it the Silent Gate.
The Second Portal
Crux Beatrix was the second portal to stand in Bixbus. It appeared on the plain beside the Bixbus River within a few hundred metres of Sanctum Lukei, in the first weeks of the settlement, and like Luke Smith's portal it is a translucent upright plane roughly three metres wide and five metres high. It has stood on the same patch of ground ever since.
It is bonded to Beatrix Cramer, but it was not hers alone at first. Beatrix had become a Guardian without a portal of her own and had worked through Sanctum Lukei alongside Luke. When Jarod James became a Guardian, the second portal appeared, and for a time Beatrix and Jarod shared it while Sanctum Lukei passed to Luke alone.
Three Containers
The best-known crossing of that shared period came before dawn on 8 August 2018, when Jarod drove a flatbed trailer through the portal three times, bringing three shipping containers from Macquarie Wharf in Hobart. One was set aside for the Learning Grove and two went to the Drop Zone as general storage. The truck stayed behind, and Bixbus had its first hydraulic vehicle.
Once Gambit Jarodan appeared and Jarod had a portal of his own, Crux Beatrix answered to Beatrix alone. The habits she brought to it in those early months, quiet and resourceful and not given to explaining herself, were the ones it kept.
Vault C
The hall built around Crux Beatrix from January 2019 was lettered Vault C, and it stood within the most heavily shielded sector of the Complex. Its work was the sensitive and the complicated: operations whose nature was not disclosed to the wider staff, consignments sealed before they reached the threshold, and crossings that never appeared on the general transfer board. Its crews were trained to record what came through without asking what it was.
That discretion gave the portal its name among the people who worked it. Vault C staff called it the Silent Gate, partly for the nature of its traffic and partly because so little of what passed through it was ever spoken of again on the Complex floors.
Behind the Walls
Crux Beatrix was among the first portals in Bixbus to vanish from ordinary view, and the least visited of the five by anyone without business there. Even after the Complex withdrew from public sight in 2023, the staff of the other Vaults knew less about Vault C than about any other part of the compound they worked in.
