Jack used to live on a space station called Salida 5 owned by DSMAR inc. The station was built inside of a class H asteroid.
There were only few jobs one such as him could apply for, 4 in total.
The menders, refinery operators, IS-miners and DS-miners.
Menders as name suggests take care of the station and the ships that dock with it. A mostly safe job, since a mender rarely ever needs to put on a spacesuit and go outside. But there were cases when a mender went to fix some issues with an airlock, made a mistake, and the next second a whole section of the station was without air. Although it doesn't happen frequently, but when it does its almost certain that there are going to be corpses floating outside the station.
Refinery operators, again as the name sugests these guys take care of refineries within the station. Their job is to take anything, miners give them whenever it is ice, iron ore, titanium ore, or anything else and turn it into material that is furter used and refined into whatever is needed or is exported to the nearest spacemarket. Safe job, I'd say. There werent many instances where a refinery would explode, but there were some accidents, where someone would have their limbs crushed or torn off from their body.
Now the IS-miners. That IS stand for "Inside Station". So whenever the DSMAR wants to built a section of the station inside the asteroid they call IS-miners, or "moles" how others call them. Their job is to mine out and prepare the space within the asteroid where the new section is going to be built. They are separated into 3 classes.
Class C - Rookies. These miners are freshstarters, the only thing they are permited to work with is a jackhammer and a vibrational sledgehammer.
Class B - Professionals. Miners that didn't manage to drop the ceiling on their heads move on to class B. In which they have much wider range of equipment to work with, including an industrial grade exo-skeleton used to carry the larger and also heavier equipment to where it is needed, among other things.
Class A - Leaders. Leaders are usually the oldest and most experienced miners, each leading their small group. They tell their people what to do and when to do it. What equipment to use. Lets just say if any other IS - miner is a muscle then the leaders are the brain.
DS - miners. Or as others call them, the "bees". DS stands for "Deep Space", they operate mining modules and perform mining on asteroids in space. Again they are separated into several classes, this time 4.
Class D - Rookies. Also known as "drunkards".
Why are the rookies called drunkards you may ask? Because you basically have to learn everything on your own from live experience. Sometimes there are colisions, and because stuff like this happens.
When Jack first flew out of the dock, he was going straight for a few moments and then he started spinning out of control. It took him 2 minutes straight to figure out that his stabilisers were inactive!
Afterwards it was pretty straight forward, learning how to maneuver and navigate between asteroids, how to attach to asteroids, how to use the robotic mining arms to extract ore and how to not get killed among the other drunkards. Which is not as easy as it sounds.
And I'll tell you why. One day 3 drunkards agreed to race. Jack was obviously not one of them but he watched, like few others. They were supposed to go around the station trice and then dock. The first one to dock wins, sounds easy right?
That's what it sounded to them. But things don't always go how people imagine they'd go.
They managed to loop around the station two times just fine. But they picked the wrong hour, the third time a cargo ship, SCT Tositay was leaving the dock. She left just as those wannabe racers were coming around the corner.
Two of them slammed right into her side at full throttle and died. The third one, bounced off of her hull, ruining both his main engine and half of his maneuvering thrusters. He was saved about 15 minutes later by a rescue shuttle. Tositay suffered serious damage to her hull, and was delayed by 3 weeks as menders worked their a$ses off on her repairs.
The third racer was lucky to survive, but he had to look for another job. Because the owners couldnt let someone like that fly with a module. Nonetheless it was the talk of the whole station for months.
Class C - Hatchlings. Are those who managed to figure out all the basic controls. In this class you have to mine the asteroids near the station, you are not permited to go beyond the space buoys surounding the station. And in this class you actually get paid for the ore you bring in, but there's an awfuly nasty catch to this class.
You have to pay for everything yourself, starting with the fuel for your module, the spare parts, oxygen tanks and everything else. It was estimated that nearly 95% of the money you make goes back to the owners of the station. If you wanted to save some up, you had to circle between the station and the asteroids about 6 times a day, and each time you did you also had to return with a full ore-hold.
Jack had it easy, since he could manage to make 7 of those loops on a bad day, on a good day he could even make 9.
The fat cats owning the station took notice. And as a result he was soon assigned to class B.
Class B - Drones. Drones are, as the B class miners are called, the more experienced miners that don't stay near the station. Instead they are assigned to a mining transport ship that are, naturally, called "Hives". Hives travel far and wide, and on their quests for resources sometimes even leave their home system. Some of these journeys can be more than one Solan year long. The job is in terms of payment a completely differend story from any other on Salida 5. And there is a rather good reason for that.
They are not the only ones flying out there.
There are of course the Anti-Solans, but they are not alone. Whenever its pirates or raiders, stray asteroid clusters, the ship you travel on itself or anything else in particular.
Anything out there can kill you very quickly.
An accident happened on a ship similar to the one Jack was assigned to. Their reactor cooling system malfunctioned and the reactor melted down before they could even react. The extreme temperatures along with high radiation killed and evaporated everyone aboard. There was nothing left but a radioactive field of debris!
That's the reason that many don't realise, the job is so well paid because it is so dangerous. So you could say that he chose the worst job for his health, and you wouldn't be wrong.
Class A - Captains. Class A is as you can probably imagined the post of the captain on one of the Hive ships. These guys are in charge of the mining operations, they say where to stop to mine, when to depart for a new mining site. Basically the same as Class A of the IS-miners, but infinitely better paid.