The genius of Year Zero lay in the way the two operations complemented one another. A colony failing from within put pressure on British domestic politics: calls for accountability, parliamentary committees, inquiries that ate time and attention. A Dutch uprising of sufficient heat could pull the Royal Navy eastward in policing and escort duties, complicating supply lines and stretching resources. The combination made outcomes non-linear: logistical delays fed political panic; panic fed overreaction; overreaction opened new chinks to be exploited.
Intelligence flowed across the web the Ghost Cell had spun. Reports from Kermarec and Dufour were summarized and sent as coded updates to the house in Le Havre; from there, they reached Versailles and the Dauphin. 072's pamphlets, after initial runs in the Jordaan, were translated and reprinted in small quantities in Holland, disguised as local dissent — a trick that bent Dutch perceptions and added insult to injury. 221's skirmishes drew dispatches from Dutch garrisons that, once intercepted and altered by Ghost Cell hands, painted a portrait of a region spiraling toward revolt.
Dupri's office hummed with a deliberately clinical tone. Men argued over margins of error, over how much water a cask might lose under given conditions, over how many pamphlets could be folded into a single pouch. The scale of their ambition demanded such arithmetic: if you could calculate thirst, you could calculate the threshold of mutiny.
For all the calculations and codes, Year Zero was also the season when the human edge of the operation came into bitter relief. Kermarec, who had once carved children's toys on long voyages, found himself thinking about the faces of convicts he would never know. Dufour, who took pride in the roundness of his barrels, tasted the sourness of his choices. In Amsterdam, 072 read a pamphlet aloud at night and felt a tightening in his chest as he imagined the violence it might birth. 221 watched a young striker run into a square and felt, for the first time, the delicious and terrible twin of exhilaration and dread.
In the Dauphin's study, the boy who was not merely a child sat with these reports and made decisions. He held no illusions about the moral topography of what they were doing. His was not the crude cruelty of revenge; his was the cool logic of a strategist who believed that empires were instruments and that their misuses could be corrected through pressure. He viewed people as vectors, which made him both effective and, to other minds, frightening.
When asked by Dupri whether there was any humanity left in the plan, he replied, simply: "We will hurt, but they will learn. History is stern. We do not begin wars; we create conditions where foolishness becomes its own punishment."
It was not a comforting sentence. And yet men followed him because he combined a child's clarity with a general's resolve.
By March and April of 1787, the effects were beginning to show. A shipment of water casks arrived in Portsmouth with obvious seepage; a barge on the Scheldt burned after an orchestrated scuffle spilled a lantern. The Dutch press, once cautious, now fumed with incendiary pamphlets reprinted as broadsheets and scolded in parliament. Little riots in provincial towns forced the stadtholder to dispatch troops; the troops' movements became news that Albion could not wholly ignore.
The British government responded with the same mixture of confidence and panic that empires often show at their first scent of threat. Committees were formed; inquiries were opened; men shouted in Parliament. But their actions were always just a step behind the Ghost Cell's arbitrage. For every meeting called, a new cask failed. For every dispatch sent, a pamphlet cut deeper into the public conversation.
Yet the revolution the Ghost Cell sought was not necessarily violent overthrow. It was erosion: of confidence, of logistics, of belief in the unerring competence of the Crown. If the First Fleet limped and the Dutch provinces bled public fury into chaos, then Britain's global posture would wobble. And in that wobble, the Dauphin saw possibilities for France to assert itself where others were too distracted to notice.
In late May 1787, at the clandestine house north of Paris, Dupri brought a fresh dispatch to the Dauphin. The child read the reports with an evenness that belied his years: Kermarec's notes on warp and vent; Dufour's logs of seepage rates; 072's latest incendiary tract; 221's tally of skirmishes and their aftershocks. He folded the papers and wrote, in a hand both small and deliberate:
Continue. Keep pressure but avoid collapse that draws direct intervention. Let the Empire tire itself. Let the Dutch be their own wound.
He sealed the note with a plain wax and sent it into the night. Outside, spring greened
the hedgerows, unaware of the cold arithmetic being executed within Versailles' quiet rooms.
By the middle of 1787 the Ghost Cell had done what it set out to do: it had converted shadow into movement. The First Fleet would leave in a state compromised not merely by accidents, but by deliberate design; the United Provinces were losing the capacity to reconcile. Whether the result would be decisive ruin or a long, grinding attrition remained to be seen. That ambiguity was, in truth, the genius of Year Zero. It left outcomes probabilistic rather than binary — and in probabilities, the ambitious thrive.
For those within the Ghost Cell, the work continued, relentless and quiet. They would not celebrate victories with fanfare. Their triumph would be measured in delayed sails, in sick lists that grew longer, in a colony that learned dependence before self-sufficiency. And in a Netherlands where reason had been replaced by rage, European diplomacy would scramble and misstep.
And always, in the center of the web, a child with a map in his hand considered the geometry of power. He had turned a curiosity about strategy into an instrument that could re-sculpt a world. Whether his methods were just or monstrous was a question that might be answered only in the ruin they left behind.