Within days, the Frenchman had offered a plan for Gray’s review. When they had agreed upon it and its associated price of treason, the French recruiter revealed himself as Pierre Renard.
The name meant little to him, but somehow the puppet master named Renard felt like a friend — Gray’s first. He knew there could be no friendship in such a usury relationship, but the false feeling comforted him.
After rolling off his rack, he placed his bare feet on the deck plates of the Dragon as it rolled in the rising seas of the South Atlantic Ocean. He reached and clicked open a metal door, and then he stepped into his private bathroom.
As he brushed his teeth, he diverted his gaze from the mirror to the metal basin. He perceived himself as a nothing, a creature unfit for cohabitation with humans, and he refused to refute that belief by gazing at his reflection.
He clenched his jaw and squeezed his eyes shut as a volcano of emotions rose within him. After a moment, he regained his focus. Then the emotions hit again, restarting the perpetual cycle of his subconscious mind humiliating him with the shame of having been sired by a wayward drunkard and abandoned by a teenage mother through her death in his childbirth.
Denied his maternal bonding, he had developed anger, fear, and misery as his earliest preverbal memories. Then a childhood in a dank orphanage on the outskirts of Manchester, where his abnormal intelligence had caused him ostracizing and taunting, sealing his fate as a tormented outlier.
He spat and rubbed an electric razor over his chin, pondering society’s obligation for him to care about people. Snapshot memories of failed experiments with trusting people, feeling empathy and showing compassion, flashed through his mind. Any yardstick he could grasp to measure the return on such investments came up empty or left him betrayed.
Stepping back into his stateroom, he recalled the odd chain of events that had landed him in the Royal Navy.
When he was sixteen, a larger boy had taken to beating him on the grounds. Friendless, Gray sought quiet, solo revenge.
For years prior to the beatings, he had found an isolated patch of grass between a toolshed and the orphanage’s wall as his refuge. The arrangement served all parties. The other children exercised without the distracting temptation to mock him, adult caretakers could ignore their worst problem child, and Gray read books to educate himself in safety.
That changed when the larger boy took to demonstrating his physical superiority.
Using a small garden hoe, Gray had launched his retaliation plan and had started digging a shallow trench in his private unused patch of grass. He worked in spurts, covering the evidence of his efforts and peeking around the shed every five minutes to verify his solitude.
His daily labor included carving a pit into one end of the trench, and it included sharpening sticks, which he hid under the tarp when the bell rang to summon him to his beating en route indoors. His ritual also included leaving raised patches of grass, which he practiced running on each day.
After a week, Gray had finished digging, and he embedded two dozen sticks into the ground under the plastic tarp. He then removed a shoe and ran it over locations on the tarp to create a random set of mud prints. Then he repeated the task with his other shoe. As the bell rang, harkening his beating, he approached the larger boy and kicked him in the testicles.
He turned and ran, and a glance over his shoulder verified that the boy’s anger had overpowered his groin pain. Gray sprinted for the shed but heard the boy gaining on him.
Turning the corner, Gray stepped the memorized path over the elevated grass patches hidden under the plastic. He stopped on the tarp, turned, and raised his fists.
As the larger boy cornered the shed, Gray stared him down. The boy charged, but as his foot hit the tarp, his leg sank, and he toppled down into the crinkling plastic and the wooden spikes hidden under it.
A spike cut through the canvass and carved a line from the boy’s wrist to his upper arm. Another barb punctured his thigh. Gray lamented that the tarp had provided sufficient armor to save his victim’s life where another wooden spear had bruised the boy’s belly.
A magistrate had offered him a choice between a sentence in a youth detention center or conscript service in the military. He had chosen the Royal Navy.
Within the service, Gray discovered that following a predictable set of rules spared him from oppression, and he found that people valued his intelligence. Officers had recognized his abilities and had guided him toward an officer ascension program, earning him a commission.
He memorized lessons in leadership, allowing him to execute robotic responses to real-world situations, and his tactical brilliance had given him a career trajectory to his present position of executive officer of a Type 45-class destroyer.
But it was ending. His commanding officer had judged him too harsh and uncaring of those in his charge. Given the consistency of this judgment from his past evaluations, he had no basis to object. Upon the Dragon’s return to Portsmouth, he would be processed out of the Royal Navy.
Gray buttoned his blue uniform shirt and grabbed a leather binder from his desk. Passing through the door of his stateroom, he noticed the main passageway’s soft artificial lighting indicating the after-dinner hours when the crew completed evening maintenance.
His heels clapping steel girders, he climbed to the bridge deck and then turned a corner behind an electronics cabinet. A sailor in working blues knelt before an open metal access panel.
He startled the sailor, who looked up with wide eyes. Gray noted the disappointment as the man recognized him. It was the look he received when he entered the presence of his crewmen.
“Good evening, Petty Officer Smythe,” he said. “I am going to conduct a random audit of your maintenance. As you know, I conduct this once per week.”
“Yes, sir,” Smythe said.
Gray slid his fingers between the zipper edges of his binder and withdrew an audit sheet. He closed the zipper, balanced the binder on his forearm, and spread the audit sheet over it.
“You’ve isolated all power feeds to your work area?”
“Yes, sir,” Smythe said. “This entire cabinet is supplied by low-voltage direct currents no higher than twenty-four volts. My particular work area has only three power inputs. I’ve secured all of them. You can see the tags hanging here, sir.”
Gray noticed the red paper tags hanging from breaker switches.
“I see,” Gray said. “Do you have a wiring diagram so that I can verify that you’ve isolated the proper circuit?”
“Not with me, sir. I returned the hard copy to the electrical division after I set up my work area, but I can get you one.”
“Get me one.”
“Yes, sir. Immediately.”
The sailor shifted his weight and extended a hand against the cabinet to balance himself as he stood. As Smythe darted around the corner, Gray dropped to a knee and reached into the cabinet. He felt for a connector and separated it from a circuit module.
From his binder, he withdrew a small electronic module and snapped it onto the connector. He then remade the connection within the cabinet, his customized module integrated into the circuitry.
He pulled his phone from his pocket and found the private and hidden Bluetooth connection to his rogue circuitry. With his phone mated, he stepped into the main passageway and rounded a corner toward the bridge. He walked through a door and latched it shut behind him.
As his eyes adjusted to low-level light, darkness enshrouded the wide bridge windows. He looked down and squinted.
“Good evening, sir.”
“Good evening, officer of the deck,” Gray said.