She ’s Invading the Cradle of Civilization

Thousands of years ago, the northern plateau of China gave rise to the first great civilization. Now Jam, an ex-commando from the BrainTrust, is searching the plateau for the untapped geniuses needed to power the BrainTrust’s expansion. She leads a two-woman invasion that could roil the power structure in China to its core.

As Jam rides roughshod over tyranny, bureaucracy and ignorance, as she accumulates ever more enemies, she wanders ever nearer to an ancient secret— The secret that powered the first Cradle of Civilization so long ago. Even with all the help she can get from her best friends Dash and Ping, will it be enough to bring the secret home where it belongs? Is Dash’s brilliance truly nonhuman? *And above all, will Ping ever get to use her Big Gun?*

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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.