Shards of Honor
Lois McMaster Bujold
 Cordelia Naismith, captain of an Astronomical Survey ship from Beta Colony, is exploring a newly-discovered planet when her base camp is attacked. While investigating, she is surprised by a soldier, hits her head on a rock, and awakens to find that, while most of her crew has escaped, she is marooned with an injured Betan crewman and Captain Lord Aral Vorkosigan of Barrayar, notorious as the "Butcher of Komarr". He had been left for dead by a treacherous rival. During their five-day hike to a secret Barrayaran base, she finds Vorkosigan not at all the monster his reputation suggests, and she is strongly attracted to him. The feeling is mutual&mdash;he asks her to marry him. She helps him to defeat a mutiny, despite some well-intentioned interference from her crew. She is then "rescued" and returns to Beta Colony. It turns out that Barrayar is planning an invasion of Escobar, to be led by Crown Prince Serg, the vicious son and heir of Emperor Ezar. Cordelia goes to Escobar in command of a decoy ship and successfully distracts the Barrayaran ships on picket duty at the wormhole exit so the transport ships following her can deliver a devastating new Betan weapon to the Escobaran defenders. She is captured, briefly tortured by the sadistic Admiral Vorrutyer, then unexpectedly rescued by Vorrutyer's mentally unstable batman, Sergeant Bothari, who kills his master. Afterwards, Commodore Vorkosigan hides the pair in his cabin. He is in disgrace, it seems, and has been assigned a minor role in the invasion under the watchful eye (and cybernetic perfect memory) of Lieutenant Simon Illyan. The new weapons give the Escobarans an overwhelming advantage and the Barrayarans are driven back with heavy losses. Crown Prince Serg, his flagship, and all hands aboard are lost. As Vorkosigan takes charge and organizes his fleet's retreat, Cordelia overhears one critical fact and deduces, step by step, a political secret that would plunge Barrayar into civil war if it ever got out. When Vorkosigan no longer needs to hide her in his cabin, she is placed in the ship's brig. When the ship is attacked, Cordelia is injured. She recovers in a prison camp on the same planet where she first met Vorkosigan. The planet was used to mass forces for the surprise invasion. The camp inmates, mostly women, live in fear until Vorkosigan arrives and summarily executes the officer in charge. Cordelia has inherited command of the camp by virtue of her rank and thus spends her time dealing directly with Vorkosigan. He proposes to her again, and she again rejects him because she sees what Barrayaran society does to people. Vorkosigan negotiates a prisoner exchange and then deals with a delivery of "uterine replicators" each containing a fetus from a woman raped by a Barrayaran soldier. One of them is Bothari's. On her way back to Beta Colony after the prisoner exchange, the Betan psychiatrist assigned to her is convinced that her injuries show that she was tortured by Vorkosigan, and the fact that she denies it means that she has been psychologically tampered with as well. She is assumed to be suffering from a form of "Stockholm Syndrome." Desperate to keep the secret of the Barrayaran plot, Cordelia refuses to let herself sleep, developing insomnia, stuttering, and a nervous tic, which further leads the authorities to conclude that she has been brainwashed and may even be a spy. Fending off attempts to "cure" her, she disables one of her "minders", takes her clothes and flees to Barrayar, where she marries Aral Vorkosigan. She also encounters Bothari, now in Vorkosigan's personal guard and much saner, thanks to good medical care. He has accepted his rape-child as his own and called her Elena. She is being raised by a local woman. The dying Emperor Ezar Vorbarra appoints Aral as Regent-Elect for his grandson and heir, the four-year-old Prince Gregor. Aral, who is next in line of succession, at first refuses, but Cordelia convinces him to take the job.