Sunward Fall

 Mitchell Yu sighed, stepping away from the interrogation portal as it went from transparent to opaque. More bullshit, he thought to himself, rubbing the back of his neck as he trudged up the great spine of the ship toward Central. 

Maybe bullshit was the wrong word. Or maybe it was easier to classify as bullshit because, just a bit, it frightened him. Made him uneasy. 

Mitchell needed a coffee. 

When reports had started to come in of drifters and other wayward interstellar characters making uncharacteristic voyages into claimed solar systems in unprecedented numbers— they’d called Yu. Three decades ago, Agent Mitchell Yu had worked a particularly large Investigations Adept case involving drifter pirates attacking large autonomous caravans heading Sunward. No one knew a damn thing, just scraps of corrupted data and wrecked hulls had been all that remained after countless hit-and-runs. Yu had been part of one of the original investigation teams, staging long range surveillance ops so many light years away from human space they needed specialized equipment to lessen the radio communication delays. 

It had been a helluva project. Slowly but surely, watching from a distance like ancient zoologists watching lions circle their kills, Yu and his team had bit by bit come to understand a culture of nomadic people entirely dedicated to living rigorous lives in space. Beautiful. Brutal. Alien. Mitchell had even come to admire them— maybe envy them? Their eerie grace as they unfastened from their hostile attack craft like vacuum angels, swift and brilliantly marked by holographic identification for unique clans, following strict delta-v patterns to maximize the dilation on their prey. 

Regardless of their beauty, Adept Investigations did their duty and in doing so, essentially rendered the Drifter subculture extinct. Or so they’d said. There had still been sightings, rumors. Yu had kept an eye on them. Hopeful. 

Mitchell stopped at an expansive viewpoint, rubbing his forehead. Thinking to himself, thinking hard. This was disorientating. Bizarre. He and his colleagues had always suspected if not outright knew that drifters had survived, possibly many of them, far out in the dark. It seemed inevitable even that they’d maybe reappear, back to hunting the freight lanes as if embracing long lost whale hunter spirits, harpooning gigantic liners a dozen kilometers in length. 

But this was different. Drifters were rare, their clans often separated by hundreds or even thousands of light years. Hunts brought them together briefly only to disperse immediately after back into their selective, secreted interstellar pathways. Yet, just in the last five cycles, Adept Investigations had intercepted and captured nearly two hundred separate clans. It was mind boggling. Impossible. He stared hard out into the star-sprayed void. 

Drifters were tough people. Adaptable. Survivors. They modified and altered their bodies, lived in great hulks that were constantly being rebuilt and changed on the fly between the stars. Interstellar space is hostile purely by its complete emptiness. A true void matched and exceeded only by the impossible space between galaxies themselves. No help was coming if you needed it, way out there in the dark. Drifters were the kind of people happy to subsist purely on their own piss if need be, so long as they survived, spiteful in the face of impossible odds. They were mavericks and legends and phantoms all in one for an age where humanity spread itself out among the cosmos— yet still clung to the warmth of stars. 

But that was what scared him, made Mitchell Yu shiver. 

What the hell were they afraid of?