Konias's mind sank into itself. Part of it didn't even want to turn on, for fear that simply firing his neurons would set itself alight with fire. If he blabbed, the Doctor would kill him... and perhaps his whole planet. If he didn't...
"Depends. What kinds of torture do you use? Nerve stapling? Virtual hell sims?"
The least Konias could do was try to smile through his broken jaw. At least, it still felt broken. The impression of his target's fists still left themselves in his face like the human butt did in the seat of a couch after many years of continuous use. If nothing else, he might be happy that they had taken his tech.
He hoped to God they found all of the physics-breaking comms devices that Doctor was so fond of planting on his agents. He didn't care where he was. They would get through. And if they did, and he heard him blab, he was as good as dead.
Everyone in the squad looked at the whole scene incredulously, including Officer Finch. But, unseen by them, two FBI agents fresh to the scene that had seen everything, and were now heading back into their van where they would not be overheard. One of them flipped open his phone.
"Code Zeta. I repeat, confirmed Code Zeta."
Hundreds of miles away, the workers within the White House received a flurry of high-priority calls. Military planners headed straight into the Oval Office, one of them carrying a single letter on his hands.
"Mister President?"
The President hastily ended his phone call - he didn't particularly care for this one in particular, anyway, so there was no real loss - and received the letter. His eyes took on a grim tone immediately, before he handed the letter back and ordered it incinerated.
He picked up the phone again, and motioned everyone out of the room at once. They all retreated as though the place was about to be hit with napalm.
"Get me on the line with Purnelaw. Now. Keep it off the records."
The phone started buzzing again, establishing a secretive link with a foreign leader on the other side of the planet... or was it a quarter of the way over? Where was Purnelaw, anyway? Oh well. It didn't matter. A voice was coming over all the same.
For one, the little piece of tech didn't try to scuttle itself, or do any weirdness, or try to escape, or try to kill someone. It stood perfectly still. The robotic arms tried everything they could to get a peek inside the glass of the vial - filled with some bizarre, greenish, bluish, grey-black liquid mixture that even now seemed... alive, somehow.
And oh, what it saw.
As far as the sensors could tell, the little cylinder itself was a simple enough contraption, if one neverminded the fact that none of its construction - or the material it was constructed from - were known to human science... even that of Purnelaw humans.
The 'metal' bits were apparently constructed from some kind of unity of metal and diamondoid, with an exceedingly complex and indeterminate molecular structure that offered many more times the durability that regular diamondoid materials offered and was yet completely devoid of fracture planes. All the hardness of diamondoid, without being able to be shattered, alongside an unimaginable heat tolerance that put spacecraft reentry shells to utter shame. Scientists estimated that it could be placed inside the Sun and survive for more than a few minutes, if not hours.
The glass, on the other hand, seemed to go even further than that in its oddity. The material was clearer than lab-spec optics, and yet it demonstrated much of the same resistance to damage and heat that the harder components of the vial were made of. It was so durable, in fact, that one of the engineers looking over the estimates judged that it would be able to survive a direct hit from an M1A2 Abrams' main gun, at point-blank range.
Other scanners picked up on strange energy readings coming from within the device's harder components, whose patterns fit neatly into some utterly theoretical models for light-based quantum and conventional computing systems. There was little to no electromagnetic activity, and a powerful electromagnetic pulse near the systems likely would not harm them in the slightest.
But none of that really mattered.
Oh, how it didn't matter. Not next to the liquids. No. The liquid was the true treasure.
Because it was reeking of a biochemical signature.
And it didn't look like the kinds of stuff you'd use in a raisin bagel.
