The Shiva cannot be destroyed by fleets of ships: the fleets have been destroyed. It cannot be defeated by a forceful American President and his faithful generals: they do not know what to do. It cannot be defeated by a clandestinely developed superweapon based on new principles of physics: no such weapon exists.

Only by integrating thousands of detailed revelations, coming from thousands of different fields of knowledge, can we find salvation. So from Nevada to China, from the Arctic to the Equator, people of both ordinary and extraordinary skills will commit their abilities. People as diverse as an ancient KGB agent, a teenage scam artist, a blind child, and a paraplegic ex-Marine, will find solutions to small pieces of the puzzle. Almost none of these people have ever met one another; almost none ever will. Yet in their billions they will come together. In their billions they will work as a tight-knit team. For we of Earth have one advantage over the enemy: though the builders of the Shivas knew enough to use technology that borders on magic, they never dreamed they would have to face the combined intellectual might of all humankind, linked and coordinated by...

...the EarthWeb!