The Shadow Cocoon

In 2163, Earth’s orbit was a junkyard of forgotten dreams—satellites and boosters from the early space age, their metal silicon and undegraded plastics glittering prizes for recycle ships. Salvagers stripped them bare, selling the haul instantly to eager buyers planetside. But the degraded plastics? Those were the outcasts—pitted by radiation, micrometeorites, and the faint friction of the upper atmosphere, their bonds broken, their surfaces brittle and unworkable in vacuum. Trading charts had them trending down to $72 a ton, a bargain too good to ignore. To me, Kael Renar, they weren’t trash—they were the foundation of a revolution.


I’d been a scavenger once, picking through orbital wrecks, but I’d traded that life for a wilder vision: a stealth habitat, a shadow in the void, built from the junk others discarded. The key was a 3D printer, an older model I nabbed cheap as newer tech flooded the market. It could dissolve those degraded plastics and extrude carbon nanotubes—CNTs—in precise lengths and bundles. Paired with a knockoff Dragon capsule, battered but legal with its air, food, and water recyclers, I had the bones of my plan. I sold my Lagos apartment, my drones, my last crypto scraps, and by day’s end, I’d secured the capsule, the printer, and a mountain of plastic from a salvage station’s discard pile.


The printer hummed to life in orbit, chewing through the plastic and spitting out CNTs that wove into a photovoltaic skin. It absorbed 99.99% of incoming light, converting it to power stored in kilometers of nanocapacitors, layered with nano-thin vacuum gaps for structure and insulation. No reflection, no detection—just a dark cocoon growing around the capsule’s docking port. Here’s where I got clever: I’d embedded magnetic fields into the CNTs, a tweak from my simulations. The fields amplified the delta—strength and energy output—beyond what the carbon alone could muster, like a hidden booster in the weave. Within an hour of the first pieces emerging, the cocoon powered itself, and I didn’t need to sweat the juice anymore.


The system navy had killed solar sails a decade back. Too many mirrored craft flashing light across the void, blinding black-budget telescopes and next-gen sensors. They’d banned reflective propulsion for all but government gigs, and most assumed that meant no solar-powered craft, period. They’d forgotten about non-reflective surfaces. My cocoon slipped through the loophole, a silent predator among the salvage. Excess power even let me sell energy back to the station, offsetting the parking fees for my plastic heap and printer. Six weeks out, I booked my launch slot, and by then, the cocoon was nearly done—a sprawling, lightless web ready to cradle my capsule.


I’d named it Shadow Cocoon in my head, but it wasn’t just for me. My wife, Saira, was due to give birth any day, and our daughter—yet unnamed—would grow up in this orbital haven. I launched alone, leaving Saira Earthside for the delivery, and docked the capsule into the cocoon two days before she went into labor. From orbit, I watched the holo-feed as our girl arrived, a squalling bundle of life in a Lagos hospital at dusk. Saira held her up to the camera, grinning through exhaustion. “She’s perfect,” she said. I laughed, half-choked. “She’s got a hell of a home waiting.”


The cocoon was fully operational by then, its magnetic CNTs humming with surplus energy. It moved like a ghost—slow, deliberate drifts between salvage zones, invisible to navy scans. Pirates wouldn’t see it, radiation wouldn’t pierce it, and the station didn’t care as long as I paid my fees. A month later, Saira and our daughter—now Zara—launched to join me. I’d sold the last of our terrestrial ties to fund the trip, and when their capsule docked, the cocoon embraced them, its dark tendrils a shield and a promise.


We named her Zara after a star I’d spotted from the cocoon’s tiny viewport, a faint flicker in the black. She’d never know the Lagos sprawl, but she’d know the silence of orbit, the hum of CNTs keeping us alive. The magnetic fields in those tubes gave us more than power—they gave us freedom, a delta change that turned trash into triumph. We’d drift, salvage, sell power, and thrive—unseen, unstoppable, a family born anew in the shadows.