TL;DR name justification down south.

There's a billion possible ways to interpret these guys at this stage, so here's one of mine.

Our little ghost babies are all about espionage, and there's got to be a reason for that. I think interpreting a goal for them is premature, but just by the virtue of being shadow wraiths, it's possible they either have a hard time creating new ideas themselves, or they just have a much easier time stealing information from others. If either opposite were true, but they still placed emphasis on gathering knowledge, they would just be scientists and scholars instead of spies. Obviously the Sophons have that covered, so...

Let's say somewhere out there in the Endless galaxy is a nebula of dark matter between a couple of star lanes. Within this nebula exist strange semi-sapient beings of energy and loosely bound matter. They don't do much because there's not much to do. It's a hostile, exotic nebula and they need to stay in it to survive. They're stuck, barely conscious, and it's been that way forever. As far as they know anyway.

One day, a ship ventures into the nebula. Exploring, establishing trade route, whatever. The nebula wraiths investigate their first visitors, and they observe language, culture, and invention for the first time. It's the start of their civilization and they soon reach full sapience.

Years pass, more ships come, and the wraith's observation meets it's limits. They start... extracting... more knowledge out of these encounters. Possessions, dream visits, direct manipulation of computers, whatever wraith-y powers we end up deciding they have, start being utilized. Consequences arise, and they must refine their techniques. It's the beginning of their identity as espionage-wraith-things.

In a society that functions and learns like this, the concept of science as we know it might not mean much to them. More important might be the ability to make sense of new knowledge gathered, to put it together with the old and make discoveries no one else in the galaxy could. Perhaps centrally important. The process wouldn't be much like science, but maybe more like reading signs in the stars or interpreting prophecies in old texts. They might not be scientists, but Diviners. Revalators. Scryers.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯  Augurs.

TL;DR: The way I see them, if they could discover their own knowledge, they would, but instead they steal it. So the closest thing to scientists they have might be mystics like Augurs for the interpretation of newly acquired knowledge. /end name_justification

I tried to keep this succinct but ended up feeling like I needed a TL;DR. Before this I started making an actual descriptive narrative but that just got absurdly long and desperately needs cleaning. I hope there's an opportunity to make use of it before the faction is complete.

Final note: I find myself looking at proposed names and thinking up ways to build upon them, but don't want to plagiarize anyone's post. I don't want anyone thinking that way towards my post, so if anyone wants to take my name concept and build upon it (e.g: Dark Augurs, Abyssal Scryers) for your submission, please feel free. I'd like the best name to win and sorta hope it's not mine. I just wanted to add something to this interesting endeavor.