He had his orders. He would obey them.
His sensor light sped up slightly as he gathered maximum information about the building he was racing toward, calculating weak points, finding the best area to strike. Behind the walls, he could detect multiple life signs; he would deny, even to himself, taking them into consideration when he selected the section of wall he would turbo boost through, but somehow, the area was clear when he burst into the building.
He locked his brakes, skidding in a semi-circle on the smooth concrete floor. Men and women swarmed the room, some fleeing, some opening fire with automatic weapons. Bullets reflected from his impenetrable shell, harmless to him, but not to those few who fell to the ricochets.
For long seconds he was motionless, scanners seeking the large shipping containers which were his primary target. Then he moved, tires screaming for purchase at his sudden acceleration.
One of the armed men scrambling out of the way of his sudden charge fell, and for a split second he slowed, torn between old programming and new, sub-processors offering up half a dozen avenues to avoid the man, primary processor calculating the damage he could do his target if he turbo boosted-
Now.
He smashed into one of the crates, coming out the far side enveloped in flames from the explosives which had been concealed within. Again, old programming warred with new, his systems screaming alarms about the threat to himself, the threat to those in the area.
His orders superseded all of it.
Flames flickering along his unmarked sides, he skidded into a turn and charged toward the remaining crates, accelerating to his maximum speed. He struck container after container, assisted along by the explosions in his wake, until he smashed through a wall and into the quiet night.
His sheer speed extinguished the fire clinging to him as he returned to the scheduled rendezvous point. Briefly, he accessed his sensor records of the warehouse - thirty-seven people had been in the warehouse at the time of the explosions - then shunted the information aside as irrelevant except for his final report.
A heavily encoded signal opened the gate which loomed before him, and he slowed as he entered the compound. A second signal afforded him entry to a small garage, as unremarkable - from the outside - as the warehouse he had raided earlier in the evening.
Within, technicians swarmed around him, hooking him to systems nearly as state of the art as himself. He fed them information on his system status, on the raid, but his primary attention was on the far door.
He was rewarded in moments by the arrival of a tall man, dressed in a military uniform. This was the man who had found him when he was no more than an abandoned project, bullied the government into rebuilding him, given him a sense of purpose and the programming to fulfill that purpose. He owed the General both his life and his loyalty.
The General was smiling, even without reading his reports; of them all, only the General always had faith in him. He revved his engine softly as the man laid a hand on his hood.
"Well done as always, KITT."