The Warden’s Chain: Keth Transit Prison

Charter and Construction

Warden’s Chain was a Keth-built transit prison in high orbit between certified lanes. The Central Authority contracted the Keth Collective to design it as a neutral handoff point. It received convicted crews, verified sentences, and routed labor assignments to approved worlds. Talarq vendors certified the power cores and safety locks. Caraphex carriers handled bulk transfers under escrow. Everything moved on ledgers and time windows. The station’s spindle frame held five truss arms, a command spire, a habitation ring, and two reactor vaults. Its beacon announced Authority custody in clear code and warned off private claimants. Docking rules were strict. No weapons outside seal cases. No private arbitration in the ring. No unlogged hull work. Officers quoted the charter by line number and expected silence when they did.

Traffic surged during the Rim crackdowns. Scans showed lines of tugboats waiting for berth assignments. Intake teams processed ident-chains and contract clocks. Most crews stayed one to eight cycles. Some never left. Evidence rooms filled with sealed gear, blue-tagged for later court review. An auditor from Slipwind put the place on a poster: “Clean custody, clean corridor.” That was the pitch. It worked until the relays blinked.

Station Layout and Systems

The Chain was simple to read even under low light. The command spire sat forward. It held the warden’s deck, traffic control, warrant checks, and liaison booths. The habitation ring wrapped the midline with dorm pods, med bays, and ration stacks. The processing wing ran parallel to the ring with intake, biometric arrays, and restraint rail. The five truss arms connected service nodes, cargo lockers, and shuttle saddles. Two reactor halls sat aft with coolant farms and emergency sinks. A narrow observation dome hung off-axis like a quiet watchpoint. Floor tags used Keth color codes. Blue for custody. Yellow for service. Red for hazard. Every hatch took the same seal-key standard, stamped with both Keth and Authority marks.

Power came from twin Talarq fusion units with layered safety logic. Life-support ran on four loops so a breach could be isolated. Gravity varied by section, but the ring kept a steady fraction. Internal trams linked nodes. Traffic maps were posted at crossways in coarse print. The Chain was built for order. It was also built for a long wait. Storage lockers under the arm spines held parts, filters, and cable stock. Some were still half-full on last inventory. A few are open now. The logs do not say who opened them.

Custody, Evidence, and Vault Protocols

The Chain kept what the courts could not house. Seized items lived in bonded rooms behind sealed mesh and pressure glass. Evidence lockers recorded every handoff. A box moved only when a slate signed two ways. Weapons from interdicted crews took the deepest shelves. There are index codes for rim-shot railers, cutter pistols, shock loops, shaped breaching charges, and bespoke hull tools. Some items carried red notes: “Do not energize. Do not pair.” Power cells were locked apart, with dummy links in the trays. The vault supervisors wore heavy collars with single-use keys that failed after one open.

Prototype drives, nav coils, and route-fakers sat in separate cages. Those were flagged for Core labs that never came. Two crates list Keth experimental harnesses for low-G arrest. Another crate lists Caraphex mag-cutters with range limits set for training. An evidence slate shows a line item noted “returned to claimant by remote order.” The signature field is blank. A later scan suggests the cage is still shut and powered, but the counterweight track under it has fresh scrape marks. Someone moved something heavy here, after the last official audit.

The med evidence room is more direct. There are four cold drawers for chemical stocks and bio-gel packs. Many vials expired. Two drawers show new frost. There is no record of a new cycle on file.

The Break in the Chain

The station did not die at once. It dimmed. Relay outages started as gaps, then became weeks. Funds lagged. Tugs skipped a resupply stop and wrote to skip fees later. The reactor alarms logged coolant loss in Unit Two, then a clean shutdown. Unit One carried the load. When supply lists went past due, ration control shifted to a tighter schedule. There are notes from the warden asking for relief crews. There is a reply promising review. After that, no reply.

No evacuation order is in the public manifest, but the dock parser shows a single heavy shuttle departing with full staff count and partial inmate load. It cut its transponder before leaving the corridor. The command logs record a final set of door locks, a set of compartment seals, and a broadcast of a standard Authority hold message. The message repeats in a low band. It is still audible from the approach if you know the code. It says, in flat Keth legal speech, “Awaiting instruction.” The message is out of date by years.

There are marks of a riot in the ring. Bulkheads show impact scars and pry-tool bites. Yet many doors are undamaged. The processing wing pods are sealed and dusted with frost. The observation dome shows a clean chair, a blank console, and a slate with missed sync stamps. A short line of chalk dots rides the lip of the deck there, near the glass. They count to five, then stop. They look recent. That is a simple fact.

Present Day Notices and Approaches

The Chain’s beacon is dead, but passive scans find it easily. It drifts slow. It does not tumble. Dock clamps on Arm Three show recent service. A set of mag-scratches along the clamp rail is fresh enough to catch on a glove. A small repeater wakes when a standard Keth query ping hits the hull. The repeater sends a three-tone code and goes silent. The code does not match any public yard. It is not syndicate standard. It does match an old Slipwind “contract present” flag, stripped of headers.

Independent crews who tried for a soft dock report tight hails. A calm voice on open band asked for part lists and time windows. No names given. No threats. A short instruction followed: “Seal weapons. Bring filters. No broadcast.” One tug found the outer doors already unlocked and slip-quiet. Another found them shut and cold. A third found chalk arrows on the deck under the lights and chose to leave. No one has a clear interior map that matches the last Authority file. Some doors are swapped. Some corridors are blocked by clean, recent sheet metal. Someone knows the station well. Someone wants clean air and steady water. Someone still keeps ledgers. A route-slate with a “K.” stamp was found in a cargo sleeve near Arm Two and sold at Vastris. The buyer said the slate contained perfect tram timings for moving between ring nodes during low-power drift. It also contained a list of items labeled “return on proof.” One line read “blue-tag shock loop, inventory 0-7, cell pack withheld.”

Crews whisper that the Chain holds inventoried gear never released. A few items show up in Rim markets with clean seals and Chain-origin paper. These papers are hard to fake. The seals match the Talarq label run used at the station. No one admits to carrying them out. Some buyers got a second note rolled in the seal: “Bring filters.” That is not a threat. It is a shopping list.

If you go, the standard advice is simple. Set your transponder to neutral. Power down anything with syndicate signatures. Carry spare filters, line kits, and nonreactive tape. Expect to trade. Expect to wait in a dark hall while a panel opens far away. Expect a voice that gives exact times and exact prices. Expect to be told to leave if you talk too much. This is not a place for speeches. It is a place for clean work and short visits. If you follow the rules, the doors open. If you do not, the station becomes a maze.

Kyraeth is a name that shows up in tool-crib marks and route-slate edits sold off-station. The marks are the same hand. A Keth hand. The edits remove loops that waste air. The edits add pauses near cameras and lifts. There is no face on file. There is no bounty. There is only a pattern: safe lanes that begin with “K.” and end with quiet docks. Crews who followed those lanes came back with parts they were told to find, and a new respect for closed doors.