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When active, the incubator level is kept feverish warm – between one or two degrees above baseline human body temperature. Thick walls of reinforced glass separate terraced growth chambers from hallways and service gantries, ensuring sterility over the four-month-long production cycle.
The incubation process is largely automated, but you were accustomed to performing habitual spot-checks before each developmental landmark, making small adjustments to gas and nutrient flow to ensure optimal growth. It was a finicky, time-consuming practice - uncommon aboard the other fleets, where less viable clones would be simply removed to open incubator space. But the thought of doing that had never sat well with you or your captain. Conflict would take your crew early and often, but neither of you had ever considered them truly expendable.
The process of performing spot-checks is more difficult now with the limitations imposed by your human physiology. But you manage it with this particular growth-cohort. In one tank, you assess the splayed-out nervous system of a fighter pilot, its vertebrae cast on a meshwork of transparent collagen. In another, you coerce thin sheets of cloned fibroblasts to coalesce onto a framework of skeletal muscle.
Those seven crew were long dead. But their genes and memories had found you still, and you have vowed that all your lost crew would one day return home.
