Details I remember from the book
- humanity has become a large civilization that inhabits thousands of star systems belonging to several different governments
- some groups are religiously fanatic, and they fight among each other
- a rogue object is discovered and found to be a perfect sphere built by an old alien civilization
- another rogue object, a planet, is discovered with a course that showed it came from the same place as the sphere, and a course that will soon take it beyond reachable space, and beyond exploration
- this book i read starts with an assasination of a political leader, but mainly takes place on the expedition to the second object
- the expedition is sent on a refitted colony ship and is escorted by a battleship named the 'Alwyn'
- the book takes the points of view of multiple people, those that I remember are from a history professor, a pilot, and an artist, all on the expedition
- the two ships travel through several gates to get to the planet
- they find that the buildings of the planet are constructed strangely because they never have straight lines or corners, but are always curved
- they find that the planet is 6 billion years old, and in the time between its creation and when humanity found it, another alien civilization visited it and explored it a long time ago, leaving artifacts like weapons
- the expedition apparently finds some powerful technology and returns to their space through the gates. what they found is considered so valuable that the government that sent them guarded their gate of arrival with thousands of warships, which were pulled from the fleets that defended their star systems from the religiously fanatic governments, so the government let hundreds of their systems get attacked in order to protect the expedition and their findings from falling to enemy hands, which is where the book ends
