There is no cover for an object my size between me and the research facility. Though my drive motors are spinning at full power, nothing material can outrun the bolt of a Hellbore. The third discharge catches me squarely.
The shockwave blasts a doughnut from the soil around me. My turret becomes a white-hot fireball. The electromagnetic generators in the turret were damaged by the initial bolt and could not provide more than 60% of their designed screening capacity against the second direct hit. My port skirts are blasted off; several track links bind momentarily. My drive motors have enough torque to break the welds, but again I slow and skid in a jolting S-turn.
My target is a research facility. It is possible that the Enemy will not be able to develop similar capabilities anywhere else before our forces have smashed them into defeat. That is beyond my control—and outside my mission. This is the target I have been tasked to eliminate.
I open the necessary circuits and bypass the interlocks. A disabled Bolo is too valuable to be abandoned, so there have to be ways.
I have no offensive armament. My Hellbore is operable, but the third ion bolt welded the gunport shutters closed. A salvo of armor-piercing shells hammers my hull, lifting me and slamming me back to the ground in a red-orange cataclysm. The multiple ~impacts strip my starboard track.
I think of Major Bowen, and of the Saxon bodyguards striding forward to die at Maldon:
Heart grow stronger, will firmer,
Mind more composed, as our strength lessens.
The citizens do not need to know what the cost is. They need only to know that the mission has been ~accomplished.
My sole regret, as I initiate the scuttling sequence that will send my fusion pile critical, is that I will not be present in .03 seconds. I would like to watch as the Enemy try to vent an omnidirectional thermonuclear ~explosion into their research facility.