The City Among the Stars

Carsac, Francis. The City Among the Stars (translation of Pour patrie, l'espace 1962)[1] London, UK: Flame Tree Press (Fiction Without Frontiers series), 2020.[2]

Mentioned by Rachel Cordasco in The SF in Translation Universe #8, SFRA Review 50.2-3 (Spring-Summer 2020),[3] who gives the translators as Judith Sullivan and Margaret Schiff and notes as a crucial plot element "the technology that allows the [Earth] Empire to track ships through hyperspace," technology that the "People of the Stars" lack.[4]

From the blurb on the Fantastic Fiction site:

Tankar Holroy, Lieutenant in the Stellar Guard of earth’s Empire, floats in space after his spaceship is sabotaged. Rescued by an enormous, unknown ship, he awakes to discover himself saved by the People of the Stars who are born and live in space with minimal contact with planets and their occupants whom they call, with contempt, planetaries.

The chilly welcome he receives from the ship’s leader [...] is followed by overt hostility from the other inhabitants of the [... spacecraft]. [...]

Tankar soon realizes that he was rescued for his knowledge of tracers, the technology that allows Empire ships to track others through hyperspace, a technology the People of the Stars lack. Out of spite, he refuses to deliver the one piece of knowledge that can protect the people who saved but now spurn him - and the consequences will be catastrophic.[5]

Note also the giant ship, for which cf. and definitely contrast A. C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (1974).

RDE, finishing, 23Oct21