"The Freeze-Frame Revolution" - Peter Watts

Amazon link

From the Publishers Weekly book summary:

".. the human crew of the construction ship Eriophora spends 66 million years building interstellar wormhole gates, so they have lots of time to ponder issues of purpose. Sunday Ahzmundin, on a quest to find a missing crew-mate, has to deal with another coworker, Lian, who is traumatised after the ship is damaged by one of the “occasional demons” that pop out of newly opened gates. Dropping in and out of suspended animation as scheduled by the Chimp, the AI that runs the ship, Sunday begins to uncover the secrets behind Lian’s subsequent death and the disappearances of other crew members, learning what hides beneath the ship’s closed and rigidly structured society."

In this novella/short novel Peter Watts is in '2001' territory, pondering the conflict between mission objectives and the interests of the 'human components' in a lengthy, opaque space odyssey.

Naturally they don't align.

The underlying problem is that we're 66 million years into the mission yet has been no message from Earth Central. Is humanity extinct? Has it been exterminated by some ghastly, lethal presence emerging from the newly-constructed wormhole network?

In the absence of a halting-state trigger, the mission continues with focused ruthlessness. The humans have been genetically-engineered for mission-loyalty, but that's an increasingly nebulous concept. Revolution is difficult when all eventualities have been war-gamed in advance by the original mission designers, augmented by super-intelligent AGIs.

Watts's novella starts slow, with some red herrings. The plot driver is Sunday's conflict of loyalties and the deeper mysteries behind the Chimp AI. The book paints its Alcubierre drive asteroid and wormhole construction robots in high-tech baroque; the characters - despite the best efforts of the author's wife - are less delineated. It's mentioned late in the book that Sunday is female for example, but you can't really tell and I don't think that was deliberate ambiguity.

Overall, this is classic sense-of-wonder SF which maintains plot-interest throughout. I thought the final resolution, ambiguous as it was, left the reader with plenty to ponder on.