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.
"A high-voltage adventure story—and an intriguing look at what the
worldwide web may become."
—Vernor Vinge
"A brilliant vision of our future networked intelligence."
—Max More, Ph.D., President of the Extropy Institute and the Extropy
Newsletter
"Why read expensive industry newsletters to puzzle out the future of
the Web? Read Earthweb to pull way ahead of today's Web pundits."
—Christine Peterson, Executive Director, The Foresight Institute
Cover art by David Mattingly
Paperback
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and
events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real
people or incidents is purely coincidental.
First printing, May 1999
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Printed in the United States of America
ISBN: 0-671-57809-X
Copyright 2006 by Marc Stiegler
All rights reserved, including the right to
reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471 http://www.baen.com