Read in The Year’s Best Science Fiction Thirty Fifth Annual Collection (Dozois, 2018).
The previous story in the volume was one you would identify as a Kress story without knowing it’s attribution, and ditto this story. Admittedly the reference to Conjoiners and The Great Wall of Mars would be a giveaway, but it has Reynolds’ mark on it.
Coming out of Reefersleep ahead of time, a Ship’s commander has to deal with a Conjoiner passenger uprising, and a Big Unidentified Thing that they are drifting, ship crippled, towards. There’s a mystery to be solved, and that provides a neat twist, and then there’s the problem of drifting to their doom which needs to be addressed, which is, albeit at a big cost.
All clever stuff, although admittedly the characters are rather one-dimensional, with one of them handily having prior knowledge that helps explain the background.
