The Diamond Smuggler

As the story goes, there was a smuggler who claimed to have found a diamond moon. That's right. A moon made of diamond, or a single diamomd the size of a moon.

Well, the only certain thing was that he would move into a territory where diamonds were valued and flood the market. He'd drink and gamble his fortune away, then vanish in his beat up old scout-ship, to reappear in another subsector to flood that market.

Now his explanation was actually plausible. What he found, he said, was the core of an old gas giant that for a few billion years ate carbonaceous meteors, which plunged to the bottom of the gravity well and under compression became diamond. When the massive central star went nova it stripped the giant of its atmosphere, leaving the diamond core naked to space.

He never said where this world was. Rumor has it that he disappeared when a very old, very ruthless diamond consortium captured him to torture the location of his bonanza from him.

I like to think the old boy escaped or died without revealing his secret. But you know how it is with drugs and mind probes. But if they got his secret it certainly hasn't affected the price of diamonds. They are as expensive as ever.