The Best Job: Space Opera

It was, her mother assured her, the best job available for a snot-nosed Ensign dropout. She bit her lip and did her very best not to remind her mother that the only reason she dropped out was because a certain someone, somewhere back in the family tree, had modded the genes just enough that she qualified as an Extra, and needed to hit higher scores to get in. Scores that were set impossibly high, for the Extras who modified themselves out of the human race and into something just as alien as any of the Associated. The ability to see in the dark, the ability to hold her breath in vacuum without rupturing something for a few minutes, the ability to sleep only four hours a night--they didn't stack up. They didn't give her the ability to nail a shot from 500 yards without a sighter, or to scale a sheer wall in 2 minutes, or to swim--she cut off the memory. She'd scored quite well for a Standard, which she thought she was--until the damn gene-test, which they hadn't introduced until *after* her mother had gone through.

Inspiration: Reading through the Kris Longknife series.
Story Potential: High, not because it's particularly original or compelling, but because it's a cozy kind of story that I like to snuggle up to sometimes.
Notes: The old "send the newbie in," "whip a situation into shape," "something unforeseen develops" saw. But not military. Say--an amusement park type station? Something like that. And the something that develops shouldn't be military either.