Sibilius had the first project ready for installation.

Béla didn’t make any suggestions about who would get what body. She’d only met two of her sisters inside the Praetor; Elisabeta and Melinda. She was still a little annoyed with Melinda for torching her boyfriend, Raul, and also for Torquemada, although Melinda swore that she never let Dear Tomas feast on her blood. As for Elisabeta, she was just plain scary! She looked at Béla like she was lunch and Elsa had missed breakfast! Plus, she was the one who had passed on the secret of immortality to Melinda.

Did she have any idea how much trouble that had caused, making Torquemada immortal?

Hmm, maybe Father would choose his son to be first! Then she could actually fuck Jesus for real! But the first project completion was female, which shot down her private little jest.

‘Are there going to be any male bodies?’ she asked hopefully.

‘Not for awhile, Child,’ her father thought back to her. ‘They take longer to develop. My son will probably be the last to be transferred.’

‘It figures,’ she thought, radiating her frustration. ‘I wonder how many of my sisters are lesbians…’

‘Het… Béla! I am not creating sex toys for you to play with!’

‘But they will be sexually functional? Like me?’

Sibilius frowned in disapproval at his unhappy and obviously frustrated daughter, then shielded his mind, blocking her thoughts out along with those uncomfortable feelings she was broadcasting.

The birthing process was a lot different for her first sister than it had been for Béla. The body Béla was using had been carefully reconstructed, reconstituting one cell at a time from her ashes and grafting it to the previous one. It had required constant immersion in nutrient fluids to keep each recreated cell alive over the years as her father carefully grafted on progressive layers.

With Béla, there had also been the problem of her reconstituted cells wanting to grow haphazardly in an attempt to heal her unfinished body. Sibilius had found it necessary to constantly inject fresh DNA into her cells so that they would maintain her proper form. Even then, he had found it necessary to cut and graft her cells back into the desired form several times over the years, and he was always grateful when the grafted cells healed without leaving any scar tissue.

The projects her father was currently working on were being created the same way Béla’s original body had been created. They were simply grown from splicing human and alien DNA together and letting it grow, with special modifications to the human DNA forcing the body to form full size instead of as an infant.

Her father used different human DNA for each project, so that his hybrid children wouldn’t all look exactly alike. The alien DNA was all donated by the same being. The reason for that, her father had explained, was because the special metamorphosis that Béla used to create her wings was part of her alien DNA. In addition, he had designed her digestive system in such a way that it was almost impossible to kill her, as she could simply ingest any weapon or projectile that penetrated her body. Using just one crewmember’s DNA saved him the effort of having to find and modify those special traits thirty times.

‘Does that mean that I have an actual father, too?’ Béla inquired. ‘Do my sister’s have the same father?’

Béla found out that her own biological father had died of old age over a thousand years ago. He hadn’t wanted to continue his existence in a Martian Drone body, therefore, according to the law as determined by the Praetor, his soul was permitted to leave their society and find it’s own way.

So as it turned out, Béla wasn’t actually related by blood to any of her sisters or her brother. They were still her siblings, though, because Sibilius was the father, the creator, of each one of them, including Béla. She was satisfied with that.

At the time Béla’s biological father had passed on, Sibilius had been finishing up an artificial moon orbiting around Jupiter. He had spent the previous thirty five hundred years overseeing the development of the environment inside that hollow shell.

Once the shell had been completed, the biggest challenge was creating an atmosphere inside it. That alone took several centuries of collecting asteroid sized chunks of ice and hauling them inside the hollow moon with a tractor beam, then warming them enough to melt them.

Making dirt was much easier. There was an abundance of plant life on Earth that could break down rocks. In addition, they used hydraulic pumps from their ship to blast the rocks with the water from the ice asteroids. For almost a thousand years, the inside of the hollow moon was one great low-gravity ocean. While the inner surface of the hollow moon was covered with water, Sibilius was forced to slow the moon’s rotation, as the weight of the water kept rupturing the comparatively thin metal shell.

Eventually, and with the help of the great sun-collecting crystals located at each axis of the moon, most of the water evaporated into the vacuum which still existed in the center of the moon, creating a breathable atmosphere and leaving a lot of mud caked against the moon’s inside surface.

For the last thousand years, the alien ship had been transporting more dirt, water, plant and animal life from Earth up to what was going to be their new home, which was already being shared with some humans – those few who had stumbled upon the great ship during its animal, plant and mineral collection phase.