The point is in the intermediate stage between the beginning of the game and when you become an enemy of the empire, when you work as a double agent. First, you come into contact with deserters, but they are still hostile to you, and the empire is not an enemy yet. Your task is to gain the deserters' trust without arousing too much suspicion from the empire before you start fighting them openly.

During this time, deserters will throw you different quests with different levels of risk. Starting from banal smuggling when you need to move something between caches and ending with false flag raids against imperials with the possibility of getting caught. Or actions during the empire's quests - for example, during a visit of nobles, quietly poison them or let the deserters know - they will raid you, and you need to make sure that the guest gets a bullet from them, or fail the quest with an emergency landing of the shuttle. You can resell imperial junk to the deserter network, etc.