Cape Canaveral - Late 2046 The crowd gathered at Cape Canaveral had come expecting thunder. They stood shoulder to shoulder on the sun-bleached lawn, phones raised, sunglasses tilted toward the pale blue sky. Children perched on parents' shoulders, older veterans shaded their eyes with ball caps, and news anchors rehearsed lines about a "new era of exploration" into their microphones. Everyone waited for the same thing, that primal, gut-shaking roar, the towering plume of smoke, and the defiant thrust of flame that marked the birth of a new machine into the void.

The morning sun filtered weakly through the trees, casting pale gold into the hollow. The air was cool, still damp from morning dew. Camp was almost completely torn down and packed away for the day when Finley and Brooke woke. “They need to go back to town,” Thatcher insisted, voice low but sharp, “We can’t be responsible for them out here”

The Situation Room, The White House – Washington D.C. - Late 2046 The situation room thrummed with a quiet, electric tension. Rows of monitors bathed the space in blue-white light, casting long shadows on the faces gathered around the polished black table. President Monroe sat at its head, flanked by her senior staff and military leaders. All eyes were locked on the screen in front of them.

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The walls of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s main conference room were lined with mission badges, planetary maps, and models of deep space probes, all reminders of what the agency had once accomplished, and what it now hoped to achieve again. Director Franklin Holt stood at the head of the table, hands behind his back, posture impeccable, an echo of his Marine days.

Shade moved ahead of the others with the silent, practiced ease of someone who’d spent most of his adult life trusting the forest only on its best days. Pip trailed close behind him, alert but quiet, matching his pace step for step. The deer trail curved around a fallen cedar before widening into a shallow depression between two lichen-covered boulders. Shade stopped.

A blur of red and black sliced past Serathis as he twisted away. He struck with his tail, catching the king snake across the snout. It retaliated instantly, slamming its thick body into him like a battering ram. Stars burst in Serathis’ vision as his skull cracked against the ground. They circled, breath hissing, scales rasping. Tension coiled in the silence between strikes.

Cape Canaveral, 2045 The harbor was quiet in the early morning light, its usual buzz softened to a gentle hum. Mist clung to the water’s surface, curling between the docked boats like smoke, as the rising sun cast a pale orange glow across the bay. Director Cunningham and General Flores made their way down the pier toward The Abyss, a sleek vessel resting still in its berth.

The river murmured under a grey sky as dusk settled over the wooded hills. Timberflow’s northern patrol route was quiet, almost too quiet for Bram’s liking. The woodchuck soldier moved steadily along the ridge above the Silverstream, his pike held loosely in one paw, his other adjusting the strap of his battered leather satchel. Bram’s eyes were sharp. He had served too long to ignore instincts, and tonight, they stirred uneasily in his gut.

The river, swollen with spring rains, hissed quietly as it brushed against the rocks. Mist hung low over the water like a mourning veil. On a smooth gray stone in a pool downstream from the shattered otter home, the serpent lay coiled. Serathis. Ancient. Star-fed. Watching. The morning sun soaked into his scale-plated body, slow and steady. Blood had dried in fine lines along his neck and side, where claws and teeth had opened shallow wounds the night before.

In this post, I describe how to generate the OpenAPI specification from the code in ASP.NET Core at build time, so you can validate the file during code reviews