"My eyes hurt," insisted Captain Dimcho Pavlov puffing on a cigarette. "I'll be dead in two years. Or worse than dead."
"Some people just get better with age, boss." The Parrot kept her eye on the darkened sea ahead and a hand on the wheel. Rogue spume arched gracefully into the foredeck lights. In the rolling darkness, the Nitram Yar held a course The Parrot had calculated would pass by the island of Jersey and continue all the way to Nova Scotia. As Captain Pavlov held to the notion that nothing will ever go in a straight line, she had drawn a bowl-shaped line on the chart, which seemed to satisfy him.
The Parrot got her name from the crew of another day, but it was more a reflection on the Captain himself than the diminuative Parrot (whose short cropped hair could not hide the woman beneath) given that Pavlov was the kind of seafarer existing only in books, or, more likely, in comics, his greying, long frizzy hair and communist-era uniform an unlikely reflection in the half price sunglasses of life.
Hungry and cold, Kimbell huddled in the cargo hold between two wooden crates.
