The Centaur
We wandered for two hundred years. We read every book and piece of fiction in the ships collective memories, we played every game, we listened to every piece of music and we grew to know every other person. At the same time we were harassed by small patrols of Marauders and it was wearing us down. The excitement had long since faded and we needed to retain our will to go on. We instituted measures. We improvised our own instruments and performed for one another, we wrote our own fiction, we recorded our travels, we created sports designed to be played in ships and formed teams, we mixed crews up and trained in each others specialties. Even with all this I don't think it would have been enough if it wasn't for the knowledge that we were the future of the human race and it would die if we did.
Ruins of civilizations are much more common than living ones. We were heading coreward because I had decided that interstellar civilizations might be more common where stars are bunched up, and we kept running into ruins. It was hurting morale. People wondered if the Marauders had wiped out all of these, and if so was it possible for us to resist them? We searched ruins for anything that might help us but found nothing.
We were in an empty system, not even any planets left around this dying star, when we received a message. There was a small ship. It had a single passenger with an astounding cargo. It looked like on of those old pictures of centaurs, if you crossed it with a dolphin. It was blue grey with smooth skin and two legs, two half leg half arm appendages and two outright arms. Eventually we were able to communicate with it. It had an advanced translation program. It told us it was on a quest. It had come from an advanced civilization as they had been under siege by a powerful aggressor, which he identified as being the same as the Marauders we had seen.
The Centaurs, as we came to call them, had built hundreds of these "seedships" and sent them fleeing out into the galaxy. Each carried enough genetic material, and accompanying technology to restart the species once a safe place could be found. This one had been travelling away from his now sterile home for thousands of years, using coldsleep to stretch his life. He saw that we had a similar situation and asked to come with us. He was the loneliest and most tired being I've ever met. He was relieved to find us I think though, because if he died we could carry on his duty for him, and I swore I would.
His species must have been amazing tool users. They're appendages and fingers are so well developed for precision work that it makes me feel a bit clumsy. They use a form of sign language to communicate and its amazingly rapid, almost as if his hands were dancing.