A novella in the Onyx Black series

Haxo had gotten his name from the word on the wall. It was one of the constants. Things that, no matter how much time passed, wouldn’t ever change. In bold black letters, his name was painted on the back wall, behind the glowing line. It was another constant. Haxo would never cross that line. It had always been there, and he knew it would be stupid to disturb it.

The slabs of light hanging from above were almost a constant too - they always displayed a number with three digits. Usually, that number was 999. Rarely, that number was -1. Never, the number was 0.

As for everything else, Haxo tried his best to keep that constant, too. Twice a day, he’d go to the tool room and took the mop. He liked the floor clean and glossy, able to reflect the shining dots above him. He wanted to be able to see them, everywhere he went. They weren’t constant either. There was nothing he could do about it. All he could do was watch them.

In fairness, they never moved much. Their movement seemed to be random, and always moved in unison - never on their own. That, at least, was constant. From light ranging, Haxo could estimate that the dots were either not real or impossibly far away. Neither of the answers satisfied him.

His world consisted of the walk, and the few rooms that branched off it. There was the tool room, where he spent his time sleeping. There was the waiting room where, on occasion, he sat down to wait. There was the ticket hall, but Haxo didn’t go the ticket hall. He had no reason to go there. It was empty, with glowing cabinets placed in regular intervals. He didn’t even know why it was called the ticket hall.

Sometimes, Haxo looked over the line. He never crossed it, of course, but sometimes he looked down into the trench that was dug beyond the line, between it and the wall. At the bottom, large pieces of metal gave off an eerie blue glow, humming along every day. The humming was also a constant. Sometimes, the hum got louder, other times quieter. Either way, it never stopped.

That was all Haxo knew. He knew he was safe here, wherever here was. Nothing bad would happen to him. He wasn't sure what that meant, exactly, but he knew it was true. And, when he needed to think, he could look up and focus on the lights. They were always there.

Everything continued. That was to say, nothing changed. He had had an understanding of time - the world was advancing. Unstoppably marching nowhere in particular. Never halting, not for anything or anyone, even if Haxo tried.

He looked down again. The floor had started to matte again.

He went to get the mop.

Three desks, each one with six computer screens. Behind them, on the wall, four large screen TVs oriented vertically, connected to one another. They displayed the entire track layout of A-Star, one of the smaller lines in the HyperMetro network. It connected the homeworld of Navareo all the way around to itself in a ring around the centre of the galaxy, passing eight other stops in its path. The rolling stock? Long fusion-powered modular spaceships everyone called trains, like their track-bound cousins down on the mass transit systems of the planets they linked together. Track was also a misnomer - it wasn’t two steel rods bolted to the ground, but a corridor of altered reality carved through space, enabling faster than light travel in both directions, even if nowhere else outside the track. The stops were space stations, usually in orbit around the nearest world. Atmospheric shuttles - atmo buses, they were called - brought people up to the station and down to the planet.

The trains were all controlled centrally. It was a cost saving measure as much as it was a safety measure - the less staff the transport group had to employ, the more money its shareholders could make. That was all that counted in the first century after galactic unification. The control tower was on Navareo, on the space port lot. From the window one could see the atmo buses take off in a five minute interval to go up to the train station. A-Star OCC - operations control centre - was one of the nicer ones. It had just been renovated. New desks, a new monitoring system on the wall made of four TVs, carpet floors and wood wall panels colour matched to the colour of A-Star line on the train network maps.

“Good morning” Ivan said as he entered the office. He did it with the same practiced cadence that he greeted his co-workers with every morning. He was never the first person to come in.

A magazine slipped off of Wynona’s face and onto her desk as she straightened her pose in the chair. She’d been doing the night shift. “You seem chipper.”

“You seem tired.” he replied. His hair was grey, his face was old and his jacket looked like it had been in fashion ages ago. He set down a cardboard cup of coffee on her desk, next to the magazine. “Anything happen last night?”

“No. At least not anything the system let through to us.” she answered and took the coffee. Ivan was still holding two cups.

“Where’s Marcus?”