Earthweb, Second Edition

Book excerpt: Now with an all-new afterword by Marc Stiegler. Doomsday Came About Every Five Years Someone Out There really hated humans. Twenty years have passed since Shiva I first swept aside Earth's crude defenses and rained down destruction. Now Shiva V has entered the Solar System, more powerful than any of its predecessors. The Shiva cannot be destroyed by fleets of ships: we tried, and it was the fleets that were destroyed. It cannot be defeated by a clandestinely developed super-weapon based on new principles of physics: no such weapon exists. It cannot be defeated by a forceful American President and his faithful generals: they do not know what to do. There is only one way to defeat a Shiva: get inside and kill it. Once again, in the personae of five champions, four billion of us are about to do just that. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).