This is book 1 of the "Solar Clipper Smuggler Tales" series.

This note contains spoilers for the book.

Natalya Regyri, a woman graduating in the top 10 in her Academy class, and their best engineer in decads, and also their best fighter in something like that timespan, touches a classmate with a history of harassing her and he falls over dead. She's the only one in the room.

It's at Sifu Newmar's tea for favored graduates, and she hustles Natalya (and her roommate) off to their planned ship before they can get arrested, saying she knows the woman didn't kill the guy, but he's undercover TIC and TIC won't believe her.

They're then chased by TIC interceptors out of the system, and only escape by a miracle and abusing their hardware. (Oh, sorry; Natalya owns an old scout ship, a gift from her father.)

Over the course of the book it becomes clear it was a setup from instant one (including drugging her to confuse her), and the chase was a simulation injected into the hardware. That means Sifu Newmar was involved (the drugging), and that seems totally out of character for her.

They do start establishing themselves in "Toe-hold space", the places that Odin's Outpost and such inhabit, beyond Confederation control. They even participate in an expedition back to trade at Siren, where they almost die because somebody has stolen all the spares off their ship and cooked the database so they order more expensive and rarer replacements that they can't use.