My 9 year old and I played a cooperative version of this and quite enjoyed it.

Traditionally, when it comes to slavery, the pirates were the good guys. Pirates did a lot of "stealing property" that was actually freeing slaves.

The normal way to play involves fighting pirates. However, with the rules-lite nature of the Micro RPG, it was easy to invert that part of the narrative.

We were pirates coming to liberate treasure and slaves from a cop-infested ship intent to "return stolen property."

edit: Thanks for a quick update! If it was cut and pasted from "Bug Ship", it's thoroughly adapted for space pirates with some nice touches.