London was thick with rumors that autumn. The press debated the morality of transporting convicts across the world. Merchants grumbled about the cost; reformers protested the cruelty.
But in the docks of Deptford and Portsmouth, none of that mattered. There, hammers rang, ropes were coiled, and the great ships of the First Fleet took form.Among the thousands of men, nobody paid much attention to a handful of new faces. Sailors came and went; ships absorbed them like living creatures swallowing food.
The "Cuckoos" slipped into the mass with practiced ease.Walsh—the Admiralty's corrupted provision clerk—played his part flawlessly. Every missing document was "found," every background check conveniently delayed.
To his colleagues, he was merely a tired bureaucrat doing his duty amid the chaos of royal logistics.
To the Ghost Cell, he was the silent bridge between two worlds.The agents communicated through subtle signals:
A misplaced mark in an inventory list.
A small drawing in chalk near a warehouse door.
A series of coded letters sent via commercial correspondence between the New South Wales Provisioning Company and its supposed partners in Amsterdam.Through these, orders flowed unseen.By mid-September, the infiltration was complete.
From the lowest decks of the Scarborough to the officers' mess aboard the Sirius, men of the Ghost Cell listened, reported, and occasionally acted. They spread quiet doubts among the sailors about the expedition's success, stoked minor rivalries between captains, and ensured that every small malfunction would be magnified once the Fleet set sail.
One of them, "Peter Clark" (real name Pierre Leclerc), kept a secret diary that later reached the hands of "051" himself. His entries painted a vivid picture of the growing rot within the English venture:
September 14th, 1786 – Portsmouth.
They boast of empire and destiny, yet their ships are a patchwork of theft and debt. The biscuit is worm-eaten, the rope frayed, the officers more concerned with etiquette than seamanship. We need only wait; the sea will do the rest.*
Meanwhile, in Paris, the Dauphin,playing with his younger siblings, received coded reports through intermediaries. He read them with an intensity beyond his years, marking positions on a globe in his study during the night. To him, it was not merely an operation—it was the rehearsal of a future art: how to collapse an empire without firing a shot.
While the Ghost Cell's agents blended into the Fleet, Edgar Thorne's situation grew perilous.Suspicion was rising at the Admiralty. A superior had noticed irregularities in recruitment logs; a few colleagues whispered about "paper ghosts" appearing on crew lists. Thorne could feel the trap closing.
Desperation drove him to drink, and drink to confession—though never to the wrong ear. Finch's courier visited him discreetly one night at a tavern near the docks.
"You've done your part," the man said. "After the Fleet sails, disappear. There will be money waiting for you in Antwerp."
Thorne nodded, his hands shaking. "And if they ask?
""Tell them the truth," the courier smiled. "That you were only following orders."
It was perhaps the first honest looking sentence spoken to him in months.
As September drew to a close, the eleven ships of the First Fleet were getting ready in the harbors of Portsmouth and Plymouth.
The names would one day be written in history: Sirius, Supply, Alexander, Friendship, Scarborough, Charlotte, and others.
But no historian would ever know that among their crews moved shadows—men who had no allegiance but to the will of a child-prince across the Channel.
Each carried a fragment of the plan:Some ensured that barrels of salt meat would spoil prematurely.
Others tampered with powder stores, subtly replacing key components.
A few simply observed and reported, their notes destined for coded dispatches carried back to Paris.
To the British officers, they were hardworking sailors—sometimes a bit too quiet, sometimes too precise—but never suspicious.
To the Ghost Cell, they were the veins through which corruption flowed.The docks were alive with noise— marines shouting orders, merchants tallying goods.
From the quayside, Thorne watched the ships sway with the tide. He felt a strange emptiness. His role was finished; he had built a bridge between two worlds, but he would never cross it. The fleet would sail, and with it, his sins.
Across the Channel, in Versailles, the Dauphin watched from his study window as autumn sunlight broke over the gardens. In his hands, he held a letter bearing the mark of the New South Wales Provisioning Company. The message was short and coded:
The nest is filled. The eggs are warming. The mockingbird will sing.
He smiled faintly. The metaphor had been his own invention.
For all their talk of empire, the British had not realized they were about to send across the world not just convicts and guards—but an infection, invisible and silent, bred in the heart of their own bureaucracy.
By the end of August 1786, London celebrated the upcoming expedition as a triumph of reason and discipline. The press praised the foresight of George III; pamphlets spoke of "a new dawn for civilization."
Only a handful of men—none of them English—knew that the Fleet carried more than supplies and prisoners. It carried the seeds of decay, planted months earlier by unseen hands.The Ghost Cell had succeeded.
Through forged ink, whispered bribes, and the quiet courage of men without names, they had woven themselves into the very arteries of Britain's empire.No fleet, however vast, could sail free of its own corruption.
And as the ships prepared to leave, their holds heavy with the future of a continent, the mockingbird's song echoed across the Channel—soft, triumphant, and unseen.