The Alliance has toppled the tyrannical empire. It should be a time for celebration, but not for fighter pilot Captain Alisa Marchenko. After barely surviving a crash in the final battle for freedom, she's stranded on a dustball of a planet, billions of miles from her young daughter. She has no money or resources, and there are no transports heading to Perun, her former home and the last imperial stronghold. 

But she has a plan. 

Steal a dilapidated and malfunctioning freighter from a junkyard full of lawless savages. Slightly suicidal, but she believes she can do it. Her plan, however, does not account for the elite cyborg soldier squatting in the freighter, intending to use it for his own purposes. As an imperial soldier, he has no love for Alliance pilots. In fact, he's quite fond of killing them.

Alisa has more problems than she can count, but she can't let cyborgs, savages, or ancient malfunctioning ships stand in her way. If she does, she’ll never see her daughter again.

But he had said himself that he was human. It seemed strange to think of him that way when cyborgs had been nothing but superhuman enemies to her during the war, but he clearly believed it.

I found a couple of interesting things in author's notes after finishing the book:

"Isn’t it amazing how science fiction offers so much potential for exploring our humanity? Sometimes with characters who aren’t even human?

...

That’s a theme that’s always appealed to me as a reader and viewer (The Fox and the Hound was my favorite Disney movie as a kid!), and I find it fun to explore as a writer, too, the idea that there aren’t good guys and bad guys so much as there are regular people with beliefs and viewpoints that happen to put them at odds with each other."

Alisa appraised him warily. He struck her as an idiot, but he was a big and strong idiot. He wore twin-barreled Chargers on his hips. Fighting him off when her hands were cuffed would not be easy.

“Slavery?” Mica pointed a finger at Alisa’s nose. “Captain, this is why I’m always pessimistic. Bad things happen all the time. Good things are an oddity.”

Mica is ship's female engineer; Alisa the female captain.  And, yes, they find more things to talk about than haaaawwwwttt potential love interests, how speshul the main character (Alisa) is or be sounding boards for long infodumps.