Page 2 of Odin

When she looked again, the helicopter had landed squarely on the H in the middle of the helipad, the circle now clearly visible. Unfortunately, he'd completely missed the sundial.

The pilot cracked open the door as the rotors slowed.

Freyja grabbed her trolley and trundled it out as best she could through the snow. She hadn't done this since she was a med student on rotation in the Emergency Department, and there'd been a really bad boating accident where they'd literally pulled people out of the water and flown them straight to hospital.

She doubted she'd be doing triage on today's patient, though. Or ever again.

"Sorry I took so long. Had to stop for decontamination first," the pilot shouted as he opened the rear door.

The strong smell of cleaning chemicals leaped out, nearly blinding her.

It must be some new protocol to do with the virus, Freyja decided. At least it was more effective than endless use of hand sanitiser.

"...after delivering the medevac patient," the pilot continued.

Freyja's heart skipped a beat. "One of the expedition team needed medical evacuation? Are they all right?"

The pilot shrugged. "Don't know. Didn't wait around long enough to find out. From what I can gather, he got into a fight with a wolverine, and he didn't win. I could barely fly with the stench, so I stopped for a clean before I came here. You should be thanking me. You can't smell a thing now." He grinned.

Yeah, but that was because the cleaning chemicals had seared her sinuses halfway up to her brain. As long as none of it had touched the ice mummy...

"Who was hurt?"

The pilot shrugged again. "A Dr Free Dolphin or something?"

"Dr Fridolfsen," Freyja corrected. Saint Nik fighting the wildlife. Now that was a new one.

"Maybe," the pilot conceded. "Now, you got anyone else here to do the heavy lifting, or is it just us?"

Freyja grinned. "I'll do it by myself, if you're not strong enough."

Worked every time – on male orderlies, as well as male pilots. No patient ever took more than two people to lift.

Of course, she hadn't counted on this patient being encased in close to a tonne of ice...

After half an hour of huffing, puffing, pulling, pushing and a shitload of swearing, they got the body bag onto the trolley.

It definitely took two of them to wheel it inside, and to transfer the mummy's ice coffin out of the body bag and onto one of the mortuary trolleys with a drip tray for autopsies.

If anyone in med school had told her she'd be doing autopsies for a living, she'd have laughed them out of the university. Now...she still wasn't sure she believed it.

She barely noticed the pilot leaving as she focussed on the mummy. Well, the giant ice block, really, that Karl had assured her contained a person. She'd have to defrost it a bit more before she could confirm it.

Freyja considered taking a couple of preliminary x-rays, just to be sure, then glanced at her watch. No, she'd promised to call her family, and who knew when everyone's rosters would match up again?

The ice mummy could wait. Besides, what if there were other things frozen in the ice with them, obscuring the x-ray? Rocks, other artefacts, who knew what? Better to wait until more of the ice had melted, so she could get a clearer picture of who this person was.

They'd keep. If Karl was right, they'd waited a thousand years under the ice. A few more hours in the necropsy refrigerator wouldn't hurt them. Not like they'd know.

TWO

"Are you sure you're safe there? Because we would prefer you to be here at home. Doctors are considered essential personnel, you know, even with the borders closed, and your father's been bringing in specialists through the quarantine every week, so we know exactly what to put in your application. With the virus having everyone so scared, hospitals are recruiting like nobody's business. I'm sure they'd even overlook that tiny incident three years ago if you were to apply..." Mum wheedled.

Freyja tried not to grimace. As a bariatric surgeon, Mum's entire career hinged on her optimistic sales pitch that she could deliver weight loss miracles to her patients.

But Freyja didn't believe in miracles – especially not the sort her mother sold. The only doctor jobs back home for her would be as an overworked country GP in the middle of nowhere, or as a public health officer writing endless policy and protocols for the pandemic, every time the WHO issued another update. "No, Mum, it's fine. Healthcare in Norway is every bit as good as it is at home, and I'm probably safer here than I would be on a plane, anyway. I have an entire lab facility to myself, while our fieldwork staff are out at site, and the only people I'll have any contact with are our team for the whole summer. I have more chance of catching some primeval mammoth plague than I have of catching the virus you're so worried about."

Mum opened her mouth to protest.

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