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As the great war reached it's zenith, the infrastructure that had once supported Galactic Civilization began to break down. Entire systems were lain fallow, vast populations were wiped out, and the jump lanes were flooded with refugees. As society fragmented further and further, those on the extremes struggled to survive in whatever ways they could. Some isolated their systems as best they could, cutting off their jump lanes and hoping for better times. Others hid themselves away, establishing small border outposts hidden in asteroid fields or in the Oort Cloud of some unassuming star system. Some, though, banded together into temporary nomadic societies clustered around a fleet of re-purposed civilian vessels with a small core of warships. During the dark times it wasn't uncommon for the refugees from an entire system to escape in any ship they could scrounge up, fleeing at any sign of conflict yet enjoying the momentary periods of peace when they could find them. Gradually, as populations recovered and generations were born who had never known any other home, these refugee fleets became more than simply a means of survival. Instead, a new culture of intergalactic nomads began to take shape.
As time passed, the war ended. When the last vestiges of galactic civilization collapsed, they managed to just barely keep the galactic economy from flat out collapsing and saved countless worlds from isolation & trade starvation. Were it not for these nomadic clans, the ties that held together galactic civilization would have snapped entirely and quadrillions of people would have died. Instead, they linked together the various refugee hideaways, pocket kingdoms and imperial holdouts that remained. This wasn't out of any sense of philanthropy. For their efforts, the Clans quickly grew rich, taking everything from derelict ships to salvage rights to excess trade goods, settlement rights, and technologies for their assistance.
Eventually, the cautious leadership of the past gave way to a new generation, and the age of consolidation began. Thousands of clans were whittled down by marriage and incorporation to barely 100, the mightiest of which eventually formed into the nine Great Clans, which dominate intergalactic banking and trade by virtue of their ownership of entire systems, unimaginably vast fleets, and the crowns of those fleets, the relic vessels. The nine are the only organized entities left in the galaxy with access to more than a handful of TL12 jump computers and total conversion engines. Plus, of course, their most highly guarded secret: the Shepherd Systems that allow them to network jumps across multiple ships.
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