Pokémon Mars

Chapter 26: More Suspicions

If it was true that Sonnet was an ambassador of the last people of Mars, it was monumental news, especially to those at the Birch Lab... but Betty didn't believe it any more than the doubters in Ironville did.

The Seri scientists froze at the mention of Team Genesis. That was their local evil team and one of the most threatening to walk the Earth. Their leader, Wish, tried to cause the living world to collapse by merging it with the afterlife, though some said he only wanted to find his biological father, Cyrus. He did successfully open a passage to the afterlife. If Giratina hadn't appeared to aid the 15 year-old hero who stopped him, he might have realised all his plans. He was supposedly jailed for life, but 50 years after the incident, the International Police went to interview him only to find that he wasn't there. They found his husband at Aether Paradise, desperately trying to work out how to bring him back from the Ultra Wormhole he entered in search of Mars, a blank canvas to create a perfect world. His husband also admitted that one of Volo's kidnappers, Lusamine's great-granddaughter Poppy, visited Aether Paradise to learn about Ultra Space shortly before she and her two friends took off on a Lunala. Those friends, Hera and Karot, were distantly related to Wish. They, too, wanted to create and rule a perfect world. It was entirely possible that they wanted to join Team Genesis, wherever they were.

The International Police knew that although Team Genesis were unprepared for anything as difficult as surviving on Mars, they had a limited amount of spacesuits, oxygen, food and building materials. Some were lost when they were attacked by a Mewtwo after their spaceship was sucked in to the wrong warp hole, but even if they couldn't build, they could survive in their ship for a while.

'B-but,' Betty's Seri colleague Linchee stammered, 'Surely they're dead by now...?'

'We wouldn't know.'

Betty glared at the older scientists who gave up on the search for past life. They all looked down.

'We can't know when they actually arrived – if it was two months or 20 years ago – because these bloody morons switched everything off.'

She folded her arms. 'Which also means there's one less team on the trail of the bandits – who may well be Team Genesis. Well, we can keep looking at data from the orbiters, but it's gonna take us a lot longer and anyone could be doing that. It shouldn't need specialists.'

'I'm sorry, Dr. Birch... we just gave up...'

Linchee shared Betty's suspicion: that they were threatened in to switching the equipment off if they weren't in on it. They waited until they were alone in the lab with the third member of their team, Farah Zafar from the Gharab region, to discuss it fully. Linchee was terrified. Although the story of Team Genesis was rarely spoken of in Seri when it happened – in fact, it was covered up by the tourist board – it was common knowledge since a movie, based on the confessions from Wish's husband, was released. Unlike her older colleagues, Linchee grew up with it.

'Are we even safe here...?'

'For now, we are,' Betty replied, 'Because they know we're in touch with Nyx. She'll notice if she never hears from us again. Ugh! We're not here to look in to this! We're here to look for bloody mould and bacteria! Despite all the rubbish they leave everywhere, Ironville is sort of contained. The other labs definitely are. But this lot could've been anywhere! They'll mess with everything! I'm so pissed off right now! As for that Rudolph – I wouldn't trust him as far as I could throw him!'

Farah nodded. 'He had to know about Sonnet in advance.'

Since they switched the equipment back on and studied recent data from the orbiters, they definitely located and identified Sonnet as he made his way to Ironville from Mt. Coronet, where he claimed to be on a 'leisurely stroll.'