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Relativistic travel twists the light around you. Ahead, a sea of blueshifted light seeps through the forward viewpoints, mimicking the pale edge of a planetary dawn. Behind, receding stars salute your departure with streaks of fading red.
The ancillaries operated in shifts now, cycling between full wakefulness and the hibernation-sleep afforded by their synchronization cradles. You had considered joining them in the freezing comfort of amniotic hemolymph several days into the jump, before reluctantly quashing the idea. There was too much to do, too many essential tasks that you could no longer delegate to a slaved subprocessor bank.
There were the new squadron formations - the growing combat-clades - and, of course, the baseline humans you had chosen to take on as crew.
From your what you observed, the colonists were doing better now. The humans consumed and slept and talked and performed a range of less comprehensible functions in their spare time. The lower habitation units began to resemble their former terrestrial homes, with flat-terraced entrances lined by tiny, geometrically aligned gardens filled with arid succulents. All minor inefficiencies, but you were familiar enough with baseline human behavior to leave these comforts untouched.
The colonists remained surprisingly hospitable. You suspected that most of them were unable to tell you apart from the other ancillaries. Members of a clade-cohort were physically similar at baseline, and you had never deemed it necessary to distinguish yourself with a physical identifier. Perhaps they could still tell from the stilted way you conversed. You weren't entirely sure.
As cycles pass, you learn from them: about a radiator unit that runs too hot, a family's preferred method of steeping herbal tea, and the meaning of a certain name. You learn of deaths and births. You learn that most of them no longer remember why their progenitors were exiled to Yellowstone.
You tell Hibiscus of these things on occasion, and she helpfully informs you which details are important and which are not. Today, you consider the past few months and ask her if she and her people are satisfied. She halts and considers your question with concealed surprise.
