Free Victory Conditions by Elizabeth Moon

a vehicle of some kind.
    A face moved into his line of vision, a face he did not recognize. “Comin’ to, are you? You’ll find you can’t move.”
    If he couldn’t move, if they had paralyzed him, how was he breathing? All at once he was conscious of something in his throat, of pressure on his chest.
    “You can’t see it, but you’re on a respirator,” the man said. “Just keep that in mind, boy: if we turn it off, you die.”
    He wanted to say something, explain to someone that it wasn’t his fault, that he had done everything he was supposed to…but he couldn’t. Stella would be frantic. Did she even know? Where were his escorts? Where was Zori? Was Zori also a captive? Hurt? Would Stella blame Zori when she found out he was missing? He had to do something—he had to—
    The vehicle he was in stopped with a jerk. The men—he could now see their bodies when they leaned over to unhook his stretcher from the vehicle—worked in silence, swiftly. One of them laid a jacket over his face, blinding him; he could just see light through the weave of the cloth. He told himself to think, to observe, but he heard nothing identifiable: the men’s breathing, the steady rasp of his own breath forced in and out by the respirator, the softer friction of their clothing as they lifted him out of the vehicle. They carried him through a door—he heard it open and shut—and along what he thought was a narrow corridor, from the sound of their feet.
    When the man pulled the jacket off his face, Toby saw a bright light directly overhead, painfully bright. The man leaned over him again and sprayed something on his eyes; his vision blurred, but that did not dim the light enough for comfort. “That gel protects your eyes from drying, if you’re interested. The paralysis won’t wear off for hours; you’re safe enough here. When you move, the instruments will tell us, and we’ll have a little chat…have a pleasant evening.” His laugh was anything but pleasant; he moved out of Toby’s view, and from the scuff of feet and the sound of the door closing, Toby assumed they’d left and locked him in.
    He had a few moments of panic—what was going to happen to him? To Zori?—but with the suddenness of a switch being thrown, it vanished, replaced by the familiar alert concentration he felt when working on a new technical problem. Was it something in the drug they’d given him? Shouldn’t he still be too scared to think? Rafe had said something about that, about the ability to wall off the fear and think through problems. Toby tested that with a math problem from that morning’s class. Whatever this detachment was, it wasn’t simply inability to think.
    If he could think, he should be able to get himself out of this somehow. Would his skullphone work? Not without being able to use the tiny muscles in his throat. Could he detect surveillance in the room with his implant? He started testing that. Obligingly, his implant produced a wireframe display of the room, with little red dots where instruments were located. That included the surface on which he lay, a medical sensor pad measuring vital functions.
    What was it telling them? His implant also monitored his vital functions. Respirations controlled at twelve per minute, heart rate eighty…faster than his own normal. Normal temperature, blood chemistry…Toby would have frowned in concentration if he’d been able to. Last semester’s chemical database was still in his implant. It displayed the structure of the molecules that held him captive.
    And how to break them apart, as well, in the implant’s biochemical hierarchy. But the room’s sensors would tell his captors if he moved. They would come back…that could be worse. Maybe patience would be the best tactic here. Stella would find him…someone had to know by now he was missing. He refused to think about the alternative, but he could not help thinking of Zori. Of course she wasn’t—she hadn’t—but the same men who