Oh man, this story.
In the late 90s I entered Jr. High. I read constantly and loved SF media-Star Trek DS9, the (then-current) Outer Limits, Star Wars. I'd read some Asimov and such when I was younger but hadn't really been exposed to literary SF, my SF reading largely limited to tie-in novels.
We had a reading class that year in addition to our English class. Many of the class periods were spent in silent sustained reading and a big part of the grade was just number of pages read and logged during the quarter. There was some analysis and such taught but the class was more about getting folks to read than much of the critical thinking that drives a lit class. Given tha reading was my recreational activity of choice anyway, this was a pretty good deal (the page requirements were something like 750 for the first quarter, 1000 for the other two. I easily cleared 10k on the year.)
My reading teacher recognized my enthusiasm and (albeit unsophisticated) SF interests. He brought in a bag of books from his own collection of paperbacks and had me pick one. SF to me still kinda meant spaceships and laserguns and I was drawn to one with an odd-looking ship giving off what looked like lightning. It was Shards of Honor, the book that has this story as a coda.
I can't link the cover since this is my first post but...well, you should google it. It's a bit...embarrassing. But something about it clicked, and I'm glad it did.
I loved the book and I suppose that makes sense since the first section is essentially Star Trek fanfiction with the serial numbers filed off (a female Federation captain and a male Klingon captain facing a mutiny get stuck on a planet together and fall in love.) But this story had something compelling beyond the space battle and political machinations, it had absolutely compelling characters. I became a member of the Bujold fan listerv (on which I--I'm sure unconvincingly-- pretended to be a 20-something librarian with a cat in Portland instead of a 14-year old student in Boise, which as a 20-something lawyer with a cat in Seattle I retroactively find hilarious)
I barely noted this little story at the end at the time. It is narratively irrelevant--I don't believe any of the characters have any connection to the main plot (possibly one of the corpses appears alive? I don't think so.) But I was hooked overall and devoured whatever else of the series I could put my hands on over the next few years. I still appreciated them mostly as pew pew stories with characters I loved deeply.
I reread them a couple of years back and I would argue this story, a seeming afterthought, is more important to the series than anything that happens in the rest of the book--thematically, if not narratively. These books LOOK like they are about space battles and mysteries and romances. They look like the kind of books that the pilot narrator wanted to be a character in (notice his disapointment at missing the war) And yeah, they exist on that level--some more than others. I think the pilot represents Bujold's readers--I suspect at least initially predominantly male audiences drawn to military SF. The other character serves to pull both him and the reader toward the real theme of the series: motherhood. In all its miriad SF forms.
This theme is stronger in some parts of the series than others but it pops up constantly. Ethan of Athos concerns a man from an all-male world picking up key new gene lines. He's surprised to find that just anybody can have a baby other places--what about all the labor costs? The woman accompanying him bemusedly states that that is treated as "women's work" and never makes it onto accounting ledgers. The Cetagandan Empire is the boogeyman in many of the early stories and is apparently your classic expansionist bad guy empire. In Cetaganda, we learn that the empire essentially exists to protect and serve an ongoing genetic heritage managed by women. Managing a genetic heritage is really another way of saying motherhood. Bioengineering runs throughout the series, and the most important piece of tech in story after story is the Uterine Replicator-- a technological mother.
And then there are stories like this one. Stories--often wrenching ones, to my adult eyes--about the actual experiences of mothers. As others have mentioned on this thread the question of where to begin with Buiold is a tricky one. The later books are unquestionably better-written, but part of the joy of the series is watching the history unfold, and later books do call back to events in earlier ones. If you like this story, though, I recommend the novella The Mountains of Mourning. I believe it was available online at one point, not sure if it is now. It was reprinted with a frame narration in Borders of Infinity. I also highly recommend Barrayar and Komarr. Both have mothers in very difficult situations as narrators and both went way up in my estimation when I read them as an adult.
A big thank you to EP for doing this story and helping me re-experience and deepen my appreciation.
