Pact
Two-thirds of the signatories to the Pan-Galactic Accords also declared in favor of the Heliosphere Mutual Defense Pact. The pact pledged financial, military, and logistical support between the member organizations. Most People's Galactic paramilitaries are therefore referred to as Pact or Pact forces, even those from organizations that didn’t actually ratify the agreement.
Zeo-centric forces of the Pact are typically made up of full-time fighters sponsored by a cabal of local authorities, powerful families, and other organizations. The sponsors can call on the services of their crowd-funded military unit depending on need. It is rare for Pact operatives to fight outside their heliosphere of origin, but occasionally heliospheres do send relief columns, escorts, reinforcements, or other militia teams into allied space.
A small but powerful minority of People's Galactic members are non-Pact paramilitary or similar forces such as smuggling rings, pirates and brigands, gunrunners, and participants in other activities deemed illegal by some authorities though not at odds with Accord ideals. Such is the nature of life that some People’s Galactic institutions have both standard occupations and sidelines in the criminal underworld.
People's Galactic zeotech is often customized and adapted, their underlying chassis construction and systems often traced back to a number of old but very successful and rugged designs. Quite often ships, suits, and even sidearms are either family-owned heirlooms or issued from a central stockpile built generations ago and painstakingly maintained.
Pact forces are most likely to be involved in territorial skirmishes, fights for resources, disruption attacks on trade, production, or communications. There’s a good chance many Pact double as brigands, smugglers, and blockade runners. Although standing united against the intrusion of Hegemony and its supporters, that opposition is mostly all that binds together this disparate group and it is common for conflict to erupt between the component organizations in the absence of immediate need for cooperation. Given that they may often be at the end of unreliable supply chains, Pact tend towards all-round tactical flexibility rather than becoming overly specialized. Pact famously favors directed energy weapons such as high-intensity lasers, plasma bursts, fusion jets and charged particle beams. Both zeoforms and support teams have a preference for tactical speed and non-physical defense systems such as maserfield technology and TTLTSDB—Tracking Lightweight Laser Target-Synchronized Defense Bank system (jokingly referred to as Tiny Little Lasers That Shoot Down Bullets).
