Jack Williamson 
Manseed 

In the beginning… … there was Egan Drake, the genius who dreamed of spreading mankind among the galaxies. Then came Megan, who took on her brother’s mantle and made his imaginings real. She gathered around her the finest in their fields – biology and astronautics, computer science and fusion propulsion – and fired them with her vision. And finally was born The Project: a thousand tiny spacecraft crawling like electromechanical wombs towards the stars, each bearing the genetic seeds for a future colony of man. And some fell on stony ground, and some fell on fertile ground and some…