Challenge

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Synopsis

Dray Prescot is a man above middle height with straight brown hair and level dominating brown eyes. His shoulders are enormously broad, to the despair of his mother as he grew so rapidly out of his clothes, and now he has a superbly muscled physique. He moves like a savage hunting cat, silent and lethal. There is about him an abrasive honesty - which has not served him well - and an indomitable courage that has sustained him during his darkest hours. Born in 1775, he joined the Royal Navy as a boy when his father died from the sting of a scorpion, and his mother followed soon after. The life in Nelson's Navy, harsh, intolerant, formed and molded him. Dray Prescot has been consistently passed over for promotion, even though he has fought his way from the lower deck through the hawsehole to the quarterdeck. Now, together with the rest of the world, he considers himself a failure. Just recently he has been experiencing unsettling dreams, of weird places and animals, strange beyond the comprehension of a plain sailorman. Through these eerie nightmares he occasionally glimpses the vague face and form of a woman who touches him profoundly and for whom, not really understanding why, he knows he would lay down his life. As we join his story he is serving as the first lieutenant in His Britannic Majesty's seventy-four gun ship Roscommon. At this juncture in his life, Dray Prescot sees no future at all for him on Earth.