Intercorporate Oversight Council

The Intercorporate Oversight Council, or IOC, is officially a standards and regulatory body formed by a consortium of major megacorporations to ensure fair trade practices, maintain operational protocols, and enforce cross-corporate compliance in unregulated systems. In practice, the IOC is a secretive and opaque authority, largely unknown outside high-level corporate circles. Rumors have begun to circulate that the IOC maintains a secret fleet of battleships that run dark to avoid identification. To most of the galaxy, the IOC does not exist. To those who have encountered it, they wish it did not. The IOC’s warships reveal that its standards mission includes a hidden capacity for direct intervention. Because the organization is absent from ordinary public understanding, encounters can be classified, records suppressed, and surviving witnesses treated as security problems rather than legal parties. Its vessels possess capabilities beyond what most commercial crews expect from a regulatory body.