Gambit Jarodan
Gambit Jarodan is the portal bonded to Jarod James, one of the two square Bixbus portals at roughly five metres to a side. Before it appeared, Jarod shared Crux Beatrix with Beatrix Cramer. From 2019 it stood within Vault E of the Bixbus Portal Complex, the largest and least predictable hall, and the primary intake for salvage, trade, vehicles and bulk freight.
A Portal of His Own
Gambit Jarodan is the portal bonded to Jarod James. When Jarod first became a Guardian he had no portal of his own, and he shared the second Bixbus portal, Crux Beatrix, with Beatrix Cramer. Gambit Jarodan appeared afterwards, in the busy weeks of August 2018, on the plain beside the Bixbus River close to the portals that came before it.
It is one of the two square portals of Bixbus. Where three of the five stand roughly three metres wide by five high, Gambit Jarodan is roughly five metres to a side, wide enough for vehicles, machinery, and loads that would not fit through any of the others. That size shaped everything it was later used for.
Whatever Would Fit
From the start, Gambit Jarodan carried whatever Jarod could find and whatever Bixbus needed in bulk. Its openings were the least predictable of the five, arranged around opportunities on the Earth side rather than a schedule on the Clivilius side, and its loads arrived in every state of order and disorder. Scavenging runs, commercial acquisitions, vehicles, building materials, and machinery came through it in quantities none of the other portals could match.
Vault E
The hall built around Gambit Jarodan from January 2019 was lettered Vault E, and it was the largest of the five. It was built to cope with irregular cargo and shifting timetables, and its crews were the most improvisational in the Complex, used to loads that arrived without full manifests and had to be sorted on the threshold floor. Among the people who worked there, Vault E was known as the Hustle.
Its openness to the unexpected made it the source of some of the Complex's harder lessons. In the breaches of 2020 and 2021, a consignment logged through Gambit Jarodan as building materials was found to contain a family of five who appeared on no list. Holding pens and sealed corridors were later built off the ramp from Vault E, and every consignment was opened before it left the threshold floor.
Into the City
As the Underway reached the rail freight yards in December 2020 and spread beneath the city through 2022 and 2023, the goods that came through Gambit Jarodan passed into the shops, building sites, and warehouses of Bixbus with no visible link to where they had entered. A great deal of what the city was built from came through Vault E. By 2026, almost none of the people living among it had any idea.
