Alliance rising
(Book)

Thousands of years in the future, humanity has expanded to the stars, maintaining a loose connection to its home planet, largely due to the 10-year trip, each way, between Earth and the nearest station, called Alpha. Alpha is the Earth Company's base on this side of the universe, devoting most of its resources to a faster-than-light ship named The Rights of Man -- a not-quite functional monstrosity built using early drafts of stolen designs. The working model, Finity's End (built from the final design), arrives at Alpha for the first time following the arrival of three other foreign ships. The sudden influx results in panic, puzzlement, and bureaucratic infighting as Alpha's stationmaster tries to prevent diplomatic disasters and the Alpha-based spacers consider the information and the offer that the Finity's End crew presents. Since the Union-Alliance books stand alone as parts of a larger universe, new fans can easily start here. --,Adapted from Booklist.