1 Spanners: They're faster and more manoeuvrable. They're going to catch us.
2 X: They'll board your vessel and assimilate you! You'll become Cybe like them, losing all your individuality! A waking nightmare!
3 Serron: Didn't anyone ever teach you to show, not tell?
4 Iki Piki: Actually, I'm quite happy for us not to see that happen.

I originally wrote Spanners' first line as:

They've got us in a tractor beam.

Then I checked and discovered that tractor beams have never been mentioned in this theme (or any other theme of Irregular Webcomic! for that matter). Since we've never heard of such technology existing before, I figured: why introduce it? It's better to achieve plot developments without introducing new technology if you can do so, since once you introduce it as canonical you can never get rid of it.

(Well, at least not without violating continuity. Which admittedly is a relatively minor consideration in this comic, but still something to consider anyway.)

So to avoid any plot problems later which could be short-circuited by use of a tractor beam, we simply avoid stating that such a thing exists. Now if only Star Trek had done the same with transporters, it would have saved the writers a whole lot of trouble.*

* Teleportation technology, by the way, has also never appeared in the Space theme comics, for similar reasons. Although it does appear in the Fantasy theme, as magical teleportation effects. And Hitler's Brain's Nazis of the 1930s developed teleportation technology. Of course.