Minuet Quartz, owner, captain, pilot, navigator, mechanic, cook, and—presently—toilet cleaner of the Scout class starship Aegis, was having a terrible day.

She had been scanning asteroids for valuable minerals in the Bathur system for the past week, but so far hadn’t found anything valuable. This morning, though, an anomaly in one asteroid’s readings suggested it was a huge geode of some kind. In hopes of riches, she had intercepted the floating rock—easily three times as big as the Aegis—and fired her anchor into its crust. After having dug deep into the porous rocky surface of the asteroid, the anchor had hit something incredibly hard and shattered, the broken pieces bouncing uselessly back out into space.

Without her anchor, and with a spare one having been on her ever-increasing list of things to buy once she hit a decent payday, Minuet had had to carefully align her velocity to the asteroid, pull on her EVA suit, and go on an untethered spacewalk.

The loose, fragile rock had been a pain to fasten her drilling rig into as well, and she had spend the better part of an hour on setting up her equipment. Then another one had gone with carefully digging, constantly adjusting to make sure the drill didn’t shake itself loose.

Once she had hit the mineral, she had been awarded with a wonderous sight. The entire asteroid was a hollow casing with an inner crystaline material that reflected the beams of her floodlight into a deep space disco of rainbow colors.

A hundred-meter-diameter lump of diamond, the universe’s most common and worthless form of carbon.