"I think the planet is in trouble and it's screaming out for help. I believe you are the first to hear the voice of Gaia." The Earth is shaking itself apart. Norwegian-American Harley Thyssen, heads up Project Earthshaker, aided by his volcano-chasing student Jami Shastri and seven innocent bystanders drafted because of their personal experience of the mysterious Shastri Effect. Six of his team are all miraculous survivors of the first eruption in the series, sharing eight days in a New Zealand hospital in a strange coma apparently unrelated to their injuries. Kevin Wagner, American businessman, is sure a new, more advanced species of human has evolved; Andromeda Starlight, second-rate entertainer from Trinidad, evolves into the very personification of the Goddess Gaia; Brian Carrick, truck driver from Melbourne, whose simple Science Fiction approach to the effect allows him to explain the inexplicable to a desperate world; Lorna Simmons, Irish born receptionist from Auckland, believes the Shastri Effect is a higher expression of love, and so falls in love with an entire planet and it with her; Chrissie Rice, French-Vietnamese skier, knows it is the hand of God at work and threatens to become the first modern non-Catholic saint; Joe Solomon was a trustworthy Greek Lawyer, until his belief that it is all a big government cover-up causes him to defraud the US taxpayers to fund the project; And with them, Dr Felicity Campbell, a humble GP from Wellington, who originally treated the six and has become the world's leading expert on the Shastri Effect. Slowly they are drawn into Harley Thyssen's web, to become warriors in a battle against forces at the very limits of human comprehension. For if Thyssen is right, then there is a war raging throughout the cosmos that began with the birth of the universe and will continue until the end of time, and now it's humanity's turn to enter the conflict.