The Immortality Thief is a ridiculously fun, fast paced, seat-of-your-pants read full of treasure hunts, traps, deadly enemies, betrayal, secrets, mysterious aliens, adventure and action as the story races to the find the secret to immortality.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and first chapter of Taran Hunt’s The Immortality Thief, which is the first installment in The Kystrom Chronicles and releases on October 11th!
Far off the edge of human existence, beside a dying star lies a nameless ship abandoned and hidden, lost for a millennium. But there are secrets there, terrible secrets that would change the fate of humanity, and eventually someone will come looking.
Refugee, criminal and linguist Sean Wren is made an offer he knows he can’t refuse: life in prison, “voluntary” military service – or salvaging data in a long-dead language from an abandoned ship filled with traps and monsters, just days before it’s destroyed in a supernova. Data connected to the Philosopher’s Stone experiments, into unlocking the secrets of immortality.
And he’s not the only one looking for the derelict ship. The Ministers, mysterious undying aliens that have ruled over humanity for centuries, want the data – as does The Republic, humanity’s last free government. And time is running out.
In the bowels of the derelict ship, surrounded by horrors and dead men, Sean slowly uncovers the truth of what happened on the ship, in its final days… and the terrible secret it’s hiding. Genres
The nothing-place between leaving and arriving during faster-than-light travel isn’t really Hell. Hell is the absence of God, or the absence of other people, or something like that. FTL engines just… I don’t know, grabbed space and yanked it forward, rippling like a bedsheet tugged out of place, and our ship caught up in the folds.
But it sure as Hell felt like Hell. In the moment between the kick to faster-than-light speeds, and before the drop out, space narrowed. In the pilot’s cradle, alone, I blinked away afterimages from the brilliant flash that preceded hyperspeed, like the universe warning me STOP in the
seconds before I broke the speed limit. When I blinked those ghosts away, there was nothing through the window except black.
Not for the first time, I wished Benny had chosen a ship with a little more elbow room for the pilot. There was no space in the cockpit for anyone except me. I couldn’t see the others; couldn’t even turn around to look, because then I might miss the drop-out point; I couldn’t call out to
them or talk, because then I might lose my concentration, and overshoot our stop.
They weren’t saying anything, either. Like I was alone on this ship. What had I said Hell was, again? Absence?
Nothing except darkness outside the front window. Nothing to see, no walls, no floor, no ceiling. But I could feel it, the space narrowing in on me like the sod walls of some grave, claustrophobia choking me. I was alone—
The drop-out point. I switched engines and space widened out the window, blooming bright and brilliant. I controlled our drop-out, swinging around, adjusting artificial gravity, and when our speed had slowed enough that light had caught up to us, I looked out that cockpit window and saw a marvel.
We had come out not far from the salvage ship, because I was an amazing pilot whose skills were only matched by his good looks and also I’d received very precise coordinates for this salvage. The salvage ship’s ancient, pitted metal revolved before us with slow majesty in the blazing firelight of the bloated nearby star.
A star that was verging on supernova.
It was a shame I was the only one who could see it, due to the aforementioned cramped conditions. I let out my breath and said, “That spaceship really doesn’t have a name?”
Nothing but the creaking of stabilizing straps answered me. I craned my head back until I could see the other three in the little room, Benny with his eyes shut and head tipped back against the wall, Quint with her little hands gone white around her stabilizing strap, and Leah with
legs braced and gun disassembled, cleaning the pieces on the bench between her thighs.
“Hey,” I said, “what’s the ship’s name?”
“It doesn’t have one,” Quint said.
“Really?” I turned back to look back out the front window; it was time to accelerate the Viper to match the salvage ship’s revolution so that we wouldn’t crash into spinning metal and be shredded like cheese on a grater. “It must have had a name once. Everything important has a name.”
The Viper jolted and, yeah, I’d changed our theta direction a little too fast, but flying a ship was like speaking a foreign language. There were all these strict rules to follow to get the grammar right, but so long as you had the gist of it intact, you could make it up on the fly and be pretty well understood.
“I knew a girl who adopted a rock once,” I said. “She drew little eyes on it. Do you know what she named it?”
“What did she name it?” Leah asked, her tone anticipating the punchline like a mortar shell.
“Roxanne.”
“Would you please shut up about names and pay attention to landing the ship?” Quint said.
Making contact with a salvage ship was the most dangerous part of getting salvage—if I was going a little too slow, or a little too fast, we wouldn’t latch: we’d bounce, and bounciness in space wasn’t the harmless fun it was in a gravity well. In space, it tended to cause hull fractures, atmospheric loss, and inevitably death. I guessed that was why Quint was so nervous. She shouldn’t have been: this wasn’t like the FTL tunnel. I was flying, so I had control. And I was good at what I did.
I extended the Viper’s gripping arms, opening like a claw as we approached the nameless vessel. All I could see out of my window now was a long horizon of scarred hull, thinned and pitted by a thousand years’ sunlight and debris so that, in places, I could see straight through to the struts and bones. An old and mighty thing. It had been abandoned for a thousand years; no one alive might
remember, but this ship must have had a name.
“I’m going to call it the Nameless,” I decided.
“Call it what it is?” Leah asked.
The Viper was close enough now. With a quick command typed into the screen, I closed the gripping arms. They slammed shut, impacts reverberating through the ship as they connected. Success.
“That’s what names are,” I said, while I ran the program that would heat up the connection and open the far side ship’s airlock. “Or what they were, anyway. We—humans, I mean—use a specific set of words as names and names only, taken from the old language. Like Benny or Quint or
Leah or Sean.” We could just punch through the Nameless’s hull with the Viper’s docking chute, but when there was an airlock in existence, it was easier to use it. “But originally, names were just descriptions, like Pretty, or Willow, or—”
“Sean,” Benny said, “shut up.”
The Viper was no longer rocking about. I shut its engines off. When I turned around, I found the three of them were gathering up their things, heading for the circular aperture in the ceiling that led to the primary airlock. Benny already stood beneath it, tapping something into the wall computer, handbrace glinting. Benny was an inventor. Necessity was the mother of invention and all that, and he and I had grown up in exile from an occupied homeworld, without supplies or the money to buy anything, so he’d learned the skills to make everything. His one-of-a-kind handbrace was one of his inventions—it contained a small-caliber, single-shot projectile weapon to be used as a last-ditch self-defense.
“Air at close to atmospheric pressure, sufficient oxygen, safe temperature range,” Benny read. “We won’t need the suits.”
He pressed a button, and I heard the airlock aperture hiss open. The air of the two ships began to mix, the breath of the Nameless disturbed for the first time in a thousand years. Then Benny, my oldest friend, the closest thing I had to family, and the last of my hometown left alive,
stepped onto the ladder in the wall. His heels vanished as he climbed up and out.
Quint was next up the ladder, but she took a long time about it, her face pale as she stared up into the darkness of the other ship. Sympathy panged through me at the sight of her silent fear. Of all of us, I should feel sorry for her the least. But I knew what it was like to be frightened and alone.
“It probably won’t bite,” I reassured her. “In my experience, spaceships don’t. Not usually.”
Quint gave me a look like she thought maybe the factory had assembled me wrong, and climbed up after Benny.
“How the hell did someone like you end up here with us, anyway?” Leah asked me, but not in a way that cared. She followed Quint up and out.
That left me alone. The Viper was coffin-quiet, like it had been abandoned as surely as the Nameless had. I hurried after the others.
Frost limned the rungs of the ladder where they joined at the seam of the Nameless’s hull, exposed to the vacuum for hundreds of years and cooled almost to absolute zero before the Viper had come along and heated it up by a couple hundred degrees Kelvin. I climbed through the cold
and emerged out of the floor and into dim red light. One wall of the room was a floor-to-ceiling window—or it had been, before age and decay had filmed the window over. The result was a semi-opaque piece of plastic through which nothing could be seen except the diffuse firelight of the dying star that the Nameless orbited.
That was the only light in the room. The Nameless’s computers might be—partly—functional, but the lights had burned out long, long ago. The room itself was long and hushed and dark and empty, like the antechamber to a tomb. The walls were splotched and crumbling, decay
creeping dust through the flaws in their build. I coughed.
“Remember,” Quint said loudly as I emerged, “we have only a week before the sun goes nova, and we have to search this whole ship first. Our boss will let you take whatever you find on the way, but we have to find the data.”
Or else consequences, terrible consequences, fatal consequences, etc. We knew the score, Quint. I ignored her, scanning the room for anything useful, and my flashlight beam fell upon something carved into the far wall.
I hurried to the wall and fell to my knees, running my fingers over the uneven, ancient scratchings in the metal. I knew that they were letters, though they were not written in the script that I had learned as a child, nor was it written in any of the languages anyone spoke now—not my native tongue, Kystrene, or the Sister Standard that was the only language I regularly spoke anymore. This language was gone, dead, had been dead for a thousand years: Ameng. Real Ameng, right here in front of me.
I trailed my fingers over the letters, carved here a thousand years ago by someone whose dust I was probably now breathing in. A message undisturbed for a millennium until I’d come along, like it had been left specifically for me. I felt out the letters, pieced together the words.
IT IS TRUE
Something scraped to my right, probably Benny or Leah, trying to pry salvageable metal out of the decay. I bent closer to the wall and those long-forgotten letters.
WE SHALL BE MONSTERS
That scraping sound grew louder.
CUT OFF FROM ALL THE WORLD
A piece of the wall fell off beside me, clanging like a cymbal as it hit the floor. The floor hit my palms hard as I fell backwards, recoiling from the clamor.
Dirty fingers reached out from within the wall, curling around the edge. The nails were cracked and yellow. A head of thick, dark hair emerged, the locks trailing over shoulders and down the side of the wall.
The creature from inside the ship flipped out onto the floor and rose to her feet, shaking wild hair out of her face. It was a woman, the bones of her face standing out sharply, pale brown eyes large in her hungry face.
All movement in the room ceased. We stared at her as she stared at us, with just as much surprise.
Then she dropped her head back and screamed.
