Nomads

True to their name, the Nomads wander the Known Galaxy (and sometimes beyond), mainly just minding their own business. For a fleet of roughly 100 sentient capital ships, complete with a full escort of remotely-controlled non-sentient ships, they are remarkably shy. No-one is quite sure where they came from, why they're around or where they're going, if anywhere, but what is clear is that they come in peace, having joined the GN very early on. Though, as they are not technically a nation-state, they settled for “observer” status.

Occasionally, they will trade with others for supplies and materials for repairs, but otherwise they are reluctant to ever be anything but evasive. It's unclear where the Nomads were during the war and the Occupation. Equally unclear is what their relationship with either the YE or the TAWN might be like. For their part, the Nomads are quite reluctant to say anything decisively, and so conspiracies abound.

Nomad government, in as much as it can be called such, is classified as a kind of participatory democracy/oligarchy hybrid. A handful of "motherships", thought to be the oldest of the Nomads, are technically entrusted with absolute power. However, as a matter of course, whenever a decision needs to be made, the motherships begin a comprehensive consultation process in which every sentient mind in the fleet is interviewed at length. Once this process is complete, the motherships send out a referendum on the topic at hand and the rest of the Nomads vote according to their preferences. The majority decision is then enacted.

The motherships themselves only vote in the event of a tie or if there is no clear majority. If the tie is still not broken or if the majority is deemed too narrow, the consultation process begins again. Given that the Nomads are all artificial intelligences communicating their thoughts too one another at the speed of light, the entire consultation/referendum process generally takes between 0.1 and 0.3 seconds. According to their records, the Nomads hold over 100,000 of these consultations every year, making them the most democratic group in the galaxy.