Shards of Honor - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

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", who has 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, and before they reach the camp, Vorkosigan asks her to marry him. She helps him to defeat a mutiny, despite some well-intentioned interference from her crew, and before she has a chance to answer Vorkosigan's request she is "rescued" and returns to Beta Colony.

It turns out that Barrayar is planning an invasion of the planet 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. Vorkosigan, who is present on the same ship, 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 a political secret that would plunge Barrayar into civil war if it ever got out, namely that the entire invasion was a pretense by the Emperor, intended only to orchestrate the death of the brutal and unstable Prince. When Vorkosigan no longer needs to hide her in his cabin, she is placed in the ship's brig. The ship is attacked and Cordelia is injured badly.

Cordelia recovers in a prison camp on the same planet where she first met Vorkosigan, and discovers that it was used as a staging ground for the surprise invasion. The camp inmates, mostly women, have been subjected to torture and in some cases rape by their captors, until Vorkosigan arrives and summarily executes the officer in charge. Cordelia inherits command of the camp by virtue of her rank and spends much 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 an exchange of prisoners, one of whom is Cordelia, and deals with a delivery of uterine replicators - artificial wombs, each containing a fetus from a woman raped by a Barrayaran soldier, one of which is Bothari's.

On her way back to Beta Colony after the prisoner exchange, the Betan psychiatrist assigned to Cordelian becomes convinced that her injuries are the result of being 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, a stutter, 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, and flees to Barrayar, where she finds and marries Vorkosigan. She also encounters Bothari, now in Vorkosigan's personal guard and much saner, thanks to good medical care. He has accepted his 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.