The Warp journey from Tuatha back to Viking is swift and uneventful, and you soon find yourself reading over reports about the void pirate attacks on the Procyon system. They seem to have slackened off in recent months, probably while you were out updating the Hazards to Spacers charts. As far as you can tell, the pirates in question have either hunted out the available resources, or are trying to keep a lower profile. Your thoughts wander back to the Golden Butterfly, and her last known commander. Is is possible that the Void pirates in question have taken damage, and the Golden Butterfly was delivering repair supplies? Or was the Golden Butterfly operating legally and took a chunk out of the pirates when they tried to jump her? You shake your head, there is no way of knowing which it is, or if its something else entirely, until you enter the Procyon system and start your hunt.

In the meantime, your crew is preparing for the hunt. Morrigan is focusing on arms drills for the common crewmen, so they won't be totally helpless if a boarding action does break out. Jace is cleaning up and reinforcing Cargo Hold 13 in light of the damage it took earlier. Simo is drilling the gun crews, and Frank is studying maps of the Procyon system, trying to figure out where the Void Pirates might be hiding. Yasha and Vir are enjoying some much needed downtime, and Zheeves is off digging up more information.

You rub your eyes. There is simply no way of knowing what you will face, so planning is rather more difficult this time around. Do you want to try and capture a pirate raider? And if so, who do you put in command of her? How do you crew her? Or do you simply blow the hypothetical raider away, collect your bounty and move on? the answers to so many of these questions depend on the opposition. Is the pirate a lone Raider? a Wolfpack of smaller vessels? A merchant raider / q-ship masquerading as a tramp freighter? A Xenos vessel? A haunted or outright Daemonic presence?

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You press the heels of your palms into your eyes and start to work through the options logically with what information you have on hand. If it is a Xenos or Daemonic craft, then there is no way for you to crew or man it properly, and so little reason to try and take such a craft intact. In such a case, you will simply have to blow the ship away. if it is a single Raider or Q-ship, you might consider boarding her, if you can disable the ship without blowing her away completely. If it's a Wolfpack, you will certainly be in for a fight, so shooting to kill will probably be your best option, possibly followed by capturing a mostly intact ship. Or even sicing Jace on the debris to try and patch a ship together from the pieces. But first you need to find such a craft, and as you are flying about in a Sword-class Frigate, you are too obviously a military ship to be anything else. So Translating in and acting as bait probably won't work, unless the Pirates in question are the dumbest cretins you have ever come across. Instead, you have to decide between an obvious pursuit, which may catch you up to the Pirates quickly, but they will see you coming, or trying to ambush them.