The multiversial insignia for mercenaries, known as "The Crown," originating in the Cal'opui Universe and required by Alliance and Federation law to be visible on any PMC vehicle or personnel uniform.
A Mercenary, also called a Merc, a Soldier of Fortune, or Hired Gun, is a private individual who sell their services to any state for personal profit and often times an outsider to the conflict with little in the way of connection or member of any official military. Often times, Mercenaries fight for money or other forms of payment rather than political interests, although individual mercenaries are known to have more morals or standards then others.
During the First Aftermath, the Alliance had a complicated relationship with mercenaries as a general rule, frequently not trust almost all of them with only a handful of groups or individuals tolerated by the Alliance government and even then tend to keep them at a arms length. Furthermore, in the Alliance there exist no true mercenary armies, as those are illegal in Alliance space with private security companies being the closest equivalent to such things. But the opposite is true in the Coalition, as it was often the region of the multiverse where numerous mercenary armies come from that are every bit the amoral, greedy and disloyal as mercenaries are infamously known for but once the Coalition collapsed entirely, so did the era of mercenary armies it help birthed.
By the time of the Federation mercenaries have became increasingly smaller in scale and numbers, as the occupation is less appeal for a relatively peaceful entity, with the few that exist have long establish more moral or at least legal alternatives or aligned themselves with morally grey or outright immoral corporations but these mercenaries rarely, if ever, truly compare to the full might of the Federation's military forces.