Command Decision (Vatta's War, #4)

by Elizabeth Moon

That crazy idiot, that stiffly, stubbornly upright prig of a girl, who shared with him a guilty secret delight in killing: she had not collapsed under this sorrow. She had fought back. She had saved him—humiliating as that was—and Stella and Toby and her ship and her crew, and gone on being who she was.

“The rule with hypothermia: they’re not dead until they’re warm and dead.

“I’m quite willing to blow them away, but not to pretend it meant nothing.”