closely pursued by a Nomad warsloop

Estaban jigged and jagged as best he could, popping missiles out the tubes when he saw a chance....he got some hits, but the lizard craft had a good shielding circuit, and it kept coming, pulsing quantum fire back at the dancing gunboat.  "Bet it's that freaking Slither again....or one of his cousins..."  Estaban was muttering to himself as he tried to figure a way out of this jam....the Nomad was closing rapidly, so he flicked on all the gatling sluggers, peppering the warsloop, trying to take out it's targeting sensors....a quantum blast slammed into a gatling turret, leaving nothing there anymore but a splash of molten metal that slewed off into space at a crazy angle....but the pirate spiders had built the gunboat pretty good after all, and it sealed up the wound and kept fighting.....the lizards were pushing to get close enough to launch grapples....Slither probably still wanted to eat Estaban's liver, but first he had to catch him.  Getting too close turned out to be not such a good idea, because once the range got short enough, Estaban lit off the brace of fusion rockets that seemed to have been patched to the hull as an afterthought...actually, it was an old pirate trick....let your enemy think you were almost dead in space, and then pour out sunfire point blank, at the same time powering yourself away from the battle at a random vector.....Estaban grimaced and twisted in the pilot station as the gees wrenched the craft about....and then yelled in glee and relief as the Nomad ship, bathed in fusion flame, twisted off course and he made good his get-away, gravatrons red-lined, rockets roaring.....