# Read the first page of The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi

Read the opening of The Ghost Brigades by John Scalzi free, no signup. Soldiers grown from the dead hunt a traitor who betrayed humanity.

- Page: https://uncovered.ink/read/the-ghost-brigades-john-scalzi
- Genre: Science fiction
- Year: 2007
- ISBN: 9781429914727
- Read it blind (cover and title hidden): https://uncovered.ink/?b=9781429914727&s=read-page
- Buy: https://bookshop.org/a/125786/9781429914727
- Borrow: https://search.worldcat.org/search?q=9781429914727

## The opening

No one noticed the rock.

And for a very good reason. The rock was nondescript, one of millions of chunks of rock and ice floating in the parabolic orbit of a long-dead short-period comet, looking just like any chunk of that deceased comet might. The rock was smaller than some, larger than others, but on a distribution scale there was nothing to distinguish it one way or another. On the almost unfathomably small chance that the rock was spotted by a planetary defense grid, a cursory examination would show the rock to be composed of silicates and some ores. Which is to say: a rock, not nearly large enough to cause any real damage.

This was an academic matter for the planet currently intersecting the path of the rock and several thousand of its brethren; it had no planetary defense grid. It did, however, have a gravity well, into which the rock fell, along with those many brethren. Together they would form a meteor shower, as so many chunks of ice and rock did each time the planet intersected the comet's orbit, once per planetary revolution.

No intelligent creature stood on the surface of this bitterly cold planet, but if one had, it could have looked up and seen the pretty streaks and smears of these little chunks of matter as they burned in the atmosphere, superheated by the friction of air against rock.

The vast majority of these newly minted meteors would vaporize in the atmosphere, their matter transmuted during their incandescent fall from a discrete and solid clump to a long smudge of microscopic particles. These would remain in the atmosphere indefinitely, until they became the nuclei of water droplets, and the sheer mass of the water dragged them to the ground as rain (or, more likely given the nature of the planet, snow). This rock, however, had mass on its side. Chunks flew as the atmospheric pressure tore open hairline cracks in the rock's structure, the stress of plummeting through the thickening mat of gases exposing structural flaws and weaknesses and exploiting them violently. Fragments sheared off, sparkled brilliantly and momentarily and were consumed by the sky. And yet at the end of its journey through the atmosphere, enough remained to impact the planet’s surface, the flaming bolus smacking hard and fast onto a plain of rock that had been blown clean of ice and snow by high winds. The impact vaporized the rock and a modest amount of the plain, excavating an equally modest crater. The rock plain, which extended for a significant distance on and below the planet’s surface, rang with the impact like a bell, harmonics pealing several octaves below the hearing range of most known intelligent species.

The ground trembled.

And in the distance, beneath the planet’s surface, someone finally noticed the rock. "Quake," said Sharan. She didn't look up from her monitor.

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