Chapter One

War! Seven? - by Todd K. Frazier

Todd sat at his computer console. It was 2:20 a.m. He couldn't sleep, once again.

He'd done too many late night shifts at KMAJ or V100.. since both were owned by the same company... and now he was used to staying up until 6:00a.m.. so sleeping had become something he enjoyed doing in the daytime.

Topeka was cold this time of year, and he didn't feel like going for a walk to make himself sleepy, so he decided to surf the web until he dropped off a few times. Then, he'd go to bed.

Todd signed on to the Reynolds Wrap Home Page and looked at a nifty picture of an aluminum turkey for a few minutes.

His head snapped back when he realized his nose had about bounced off of the wrist rest on his desktop. He'd caught himself sleeping and decided it was time to go to bed. He clicked the shutdown button on the keyboard and was rewarded with a red alert klaxxon that about destroyed his ear drums. Todd tried to shut off the noise before it woke his two girls and wife.

Fully awake and looking around for a shut off switch, he realized he was not in his den. He was someplace else, with gleaming control panels and a lot of red flashing lights. One of the red lights flashed the words Red Alert! over and over. He pressed the button below it, and was rewarded with silence, which was a good thing, since he now had a terrible headache.

He sat down in the nearest chair and swiveled around to take in his surroundings. "Wow! This looks just like the Enterprise of Captain Kirks era!" Todd said to himself.. He was totally alone. He noticed for the first time that the bridge was making the same sound effects that he had heard on the television show, only more authentic.

For a few minutes, Todd was amused by all that he saw. After a while, however, he started to come to his senses and wondered how in the world he had come to be on this bridge. "Screen on?" He asked the air around him.

The viewscreen at the front of the bridge came to life and displayed a nice star field. It was hard to see all of the stars because there was a large Klingon ship in the way. "I must be dreaming. There is no way that this is real." He said aloud to his lonely surroundings.

The ship in the viewscreen powered up it's photon torpedo tubes as was obvious to Todd when the tube began to glow a nice reddish color. "But just in case this isn't a dream... shields up?"

The ship shield-display indicated that shields had gone up.

"This is only a dream. This is only a dream." Todd chanted over and over, hoping this was only a dream.

Continues