What’s a Flower girl to do when the Terran Marines invade her garden?

1 =

No matter what anyone says, being born out of a Uterine Bio Replicator isn’t all that bad.

There was no time wasted learning how to walk or use a bathroom. No boring days in school. You just wake up in a vat of bio sludge fully adult, fully trained, and ready to work.

I was made to work in the flower gardens of the Alon family estate, Fairmont, one of the thousand servents here that they were allowed to have by the Astorial colonial charter. All day long I tended my flowers, checking and treating the soil, transplanting new fully grown plants from the bio replicator, and plucking out the ones that had begun to wilt.

One bad flower can make an entire garden unsightly.

Unlike my sisters that worked out in the fields that grew the Alon familys natural food stock, since vat food was beneath them, I was made to look as pretty as a flower myself. This is why I was named Buttercup since my hair was the same yellow as the flower.

It was nice to have my own name since all of the Flower girls had nearly the same face and the same green eyes. And plenty of them had the same yellow hair. Me being Buttercup make me different from the rest.

Although Miss Thorn said when she gave me the name that there was another Buttercup before me, and there will be another one after me.

“Did the last Buttercup do a good job?”

Miss Thorn slowly closed her eyes. “Yes, she did a very good job Buttercup.”

That made me happy. “Then I’m happy to share my name with her.”

At night I slept in the dorms with my sisters. Sometimes the younger Alon boy, Chesterton, came into our dorm late at night to touch my sisters and do things to them. When he worked his way around to me, I woke up when he touched my chest. I asked him, “Please don’t do that.” and he got an odd look on his face and left.

I didn’t see him again, since the new visitors showed up soon after that.

At first, I just thought they were normal visitors from one of the other families or some of the more distant Alon family members who lived outside of the main estate, but the brutal looking vehicles dropping toward Fairmont were far too large for even the delivery vehicles let alone the fancy transports the owners used. I focused on finishing my work since visitors would sometimes walk in the gardens, and sometimes if a flower girl was still working outside the visitors would tell them to come with them.

Sometimes those sisters came back hurt, or didn’t come back at all.

A few months later we would have another sister with the same name. Sometimes that made me wonder just how many Buttercups there had been.

So I was surprised to see Mistress Allison Alon running through the gardens in one of her day dresses with her skirt lifted up high along with two strangely dressed visitors yelling. "Stop running bitch, you ain't got nowhere to go! No matter how freaky fast you are…”

The visitors were dressed like Tech boys with hard protective hats, thick ugly clothing and carrying devices I was unfamiliar with. But their clothing had a lot of padding on then and they flickered and changed from patches of green colors to wild swatches of all the colors of the garden as they ran through it.

As Miss Allison ran by me she waved her hand in the direction of her visitors, “Stop them!”

I tried to bow and keep facing her at the same time. “I’m sorry, Miss Allison. But how?”

As she headed towards the hedge maze, I could hear her shout, “Attack them!”

I knew what the word meant of course, but I have never really thought about how someone would go about attacking someone. So when I turned around to see the two visitors nearly in front of me, I held up my garden trowel in their general direction. "Stop?"

The large man stopped and looked down at the dirty little garden tool and made a sort of "Snert" sound, while the much smaller ugly woman pointed a complex looking device at me with one hand. "Sir, what am I supposed to do? She one of the victims, right?"

The large man shrugged. “Stun her. When in doubt Peters, stun them all, and let Intell sort them out later.”

The ugly woman pointed the device at me again, there was a flash of light from it, and my whole body went numb until I fell over on top of my Begonias. Oh no. I had to get off of them.

I heard the man talking as I started to struggle to my feet, it was hard to do when I couldn’t feel much of anything. "The regs for stunners are to keep them set on high during an engagement, Peters."

“Ah... it was on high Sir.”

There was a pause. “Why the hell would they give their slaves combat mods? Hit her again."

I could see a flash of blue light again, then I was lying flat on my back. Apollo, the larger sun was shining down in my eyes. Flat on my back, I had to be hurting even more flowers now, so I dared to protest, “...no...”

"Son of a… Hit her again Peters. Then let's go see how Miss High and Mighty like a triple stun shot to the back of her head.”

2 =

I woke up in a dorm, Rose told me one of the visitors had carried me here and asked which bunk was made. My sisters didn’t know what he meant. They explained that it’s just bunks. We already have a dedicated dorm just for us Flower girls, why would we need a special bunk for each one of us?

Then the visitor got mad and told my sisters to stay inside the dorms, leaving two of the strange visitors at the top of the entrance ramp.

I sat up and found out my body was all tingly, so it took me a moment to get up to my feet. But I did it anyways because the visitors were making us do everything wrong.

You worked, you showered, then you ate before you went to bed. Unless a visitor took you to the house, they weren't supposed to interfere with things. Only the Alon could do that.

So I went to the ramp leading up the ground to tell the visitors that.

I heard one of them notice me as I headed that way. “We got company Jeff.”

The ugly man, Jeff smiled at me in a way that reminded me of Chesterton. “Hi there pretty lady, you can talk to me, but you have to stay down there.”

I felt... Irked. Yes, that was a good word. "We are supposed to wash and eat after we work, but before we sleep. The ugly woman Peters made me sleep with the blue light. That is wrong.”

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The two men gave me a started look, then laughed. The one called Jeff spoke again. "Aw man, I got to show Peters a clip of that." The other one shook his head and looked down at me. "You can't say that people are ugly miss, it isn't nice, and it can hurt people's feelings."

I felt my eyes go wide. That’s how I could attack people. With my words. It would be much easier than trying to figure out how to effectively trowel them.

The visitor called Jeff began to talk again. “I got orders too little girl, but maybe later on the two of us could meet up somewhere…"

He stopped talking when the other one snapped at him. “Jeff, she’s like three years old or something, and that's in T-years. We got strict orders about this.”

Jeff started counting out with his fingers. “One, she’s physically all grown up, and Two, it’s just orders for right now. Who knows what could change after Frontier takes over?”

He stopped when he saw me shaking my head, I had figured out what he had in mind. “No. I don’t want that. When my sisters go do touching things with visitors, they come back hurt sometimes, and I know how Chesterton touches the new girls. I don't want that."

Jeff looked a little pale, then angry. “I… I was just trying to tease you a little miss, and to mess with Tam.” He waved his hand at the other man. “None of us will touch you in any way that you don’t want. Marines don’t do that. Not if they want to survive though the night.”

Tam gave the other visitor a nod. “Hoo ra.”

Tam looked down at me from the top of the ramp. “Did they give you a name young lady?”

I nodded eagerly, no one had ever asked for my name. My sisters all knew it, and I was just a "Girl" to the Alon and their visitors. “Miss Thorn gave me the name Buttercup, the old Buttercup got too old and had to go before she became a bad girl.”

The two men looked at each other. Jeff asked me. “What’s a bad girl, Buttercup?”

I recited "Bad girls ask questions and stop to strive, that's why good girls have to go when they turn five."

That upset the two of them. These visitors do get upset at the oddest things.

Tam asked me, "Do you all, "go" when you turn five? I shook my head. “Oh no, the best girls like Miss Thorn get to stay around for years and years so she can learn how to train new girls and take care of things like getting us food and handing out jobs for the day.”

They looked at each other again. Then one of them pressed something on the side of his hard hat. “Captain, we got some information you might want to hear.”

After a while, Miss Thorn came back and told us that we could get cleaned up and eat. Then we went to bed.

The next two days passed with us being kept in the dorms, not able to do our work.

It was very boring, and that irked me. My flower could stand a few days of not being cared for, but I couldn’t stand another day of not caring for them.

These visitors were very troublesome even if they didn't take any of my sisters away, taking my work away wasn't in any way as bad, just… irksome.

So I looked for another way out of the dorms other than the entrance. I knew there was some way to get above ground hidden in the spaces under things like the gazebos or underneath the tiles in the walkways. I had seen Tech boys crawl in and out of them, and I had often seen those same tech boys inside our dorms.

So there had to be other ways than the entrance ramp to get in and out.

I asked the girls and Rose showed me a door that didn’t look like a door that she had seen a Tech boy use. After a bit of poking and prying with my trowel, I got it open.

There were tunnels and ladders.

As always I shared with my sisters. Soon all of us from the Flower girls, to the Hedge girls, the Grove girls, the Lawn girls, and the Patio girls were soon outside and doing their work.

This upset the visitors, Tam stayed at the dorms entrance but Jeff began running around trying to get my sisters to go back to the dorms before we finished our work. He even grabbed Poesy by the arm and tried to pull her back toward the entrance.

“Don’t touch her. She doesn't want you to touch her. You said Marines don’t do that. Don’t make me call you ugly and hurt your feeling.”

Jeff snatched his hand away from Poesy with a confused look on his face, while Tam broke out laughing until he almost fell back down the ramp.

Then more visitors showed up with the large man back again. Hearing me threaten to attack Jeff, he slowly shook his head. “Private Renalt, Report.”

Jeff hit himself in the head for some reason and grinned, “Sir, I must report that the slaves are revolting. They are refusing to sit around and not work.” He shook his head sadly. “Kids these days.”

The large man gave Jeff a steady stare until Jeff lost his smile, which struck me as a little mean.

“Back to your post private.” Then he touched his hard hat. “Someone get Miss Thorn out here.”

Miss Thorn told the large man that the easiest thing would be to let us finish our work, and then she would talk to us later during dinner.

So that's what we did. For most of the three days once again we could just do our work without any concerns about interruptions. The flowers looked well, I only had to replace a few of the Begonias.

3 =

As we washed that night the Lawn and the Patio girls complained about all the damage the visitors had done to the landing pad and the front walk and that the House girls and boys said that there had been fighting inside the house that they hadn’t been allowed to fix.

These visitors were so troublesome, but at least they had taken the Alon family members away somewhere, supposedly never to return. Running the estate would be so much easier without the owners around to interfere.

Miss Thorn talked to us after we had all eaten, the various groups of girls had been asked to stick around rather than going to bed after they ate. Thorn introduced us to a Miss Rodgers, another ugly woman in clothes that looked more like something a house servant would wear, but with some jewelry like an under dressed visitor to the estate. The normal kind.

Jeff and Tam had followed her in but stopped at the doorway to the dining hall. If they had come earlier they could have had a bowl of my favorite. The blue stuff with the orange crunchy bits.

The older woman liked to talk a lot.

“My name is Miss Rodger and I’m with the Department of the Frontier. Besides helping people settle new worlds on the frontier of the Terran Commonwealth, we are also responsible for inspecting wildcat colonies made by people who headed out beyond the frontier to go off and do things that are not allowed in the Commonwealth.”

The older woman had been smiling in a weird way like the Alons often did when they had visitors they didn’t like. Now Miss Rodger lost her smile.

“What they did to you was very bad, not just growing you to adulthood in a uterine replicator and forcing you to work as slave labor, but also for killing all the children that came before you when the obedience compulsions began to wear off when they reached the age of five…”

Miss Rodgers shuttered and I could see now that she had been very, very angry this entire time.

“For once, I truly understand why people have to be judged by impartial professionals. If it was up to me…”

She shook her head and held her hand up to show us she needed a moment.

I needed one too.

I had always known that something bad happened to bad girls. But I thought they just went somewhere else, somewhere without their jobs to do. But all this time, the Alon had been killing them…

Calling the owners ugly to attack them didn't feel like it would be enough.

From the back of the room could hear Jeff quietly saying some words about the owners that I didn’t understand, then Tam said one single word that Jeff had just used a couple of times just a moment before.

Miss Rodgers lowered her hand.

“I’m afraid you will all have to leave your homes, we don’t have the facilities to help you on this world.”

My sisters began to get upset. Tulip was shaking in her seat, and I went over to wrap my arms around her and softly tell her it was going to be okay. Poesy and some other girls got up and ran to the dorms despite Jack and Tam's hands off attempts to stop them. While Rose protested that she didn’t want to go if it meant she couldn’t see Pliers again.

I think one of tech boys is named Pliers… Oh, that’s how she knew how to find the hidden doors. Rose is almost five.

The Frontier official sighed.”I’m sorry, but you need to go to school and finish growing up on the inside too. You need this.”

Rose became angry and grabbed her chair, throwing it at a wall hard enough to crumple the metal seat and dent the wall.

Jack shot Rose with a blue light device, which was enough to calm Rose down as I helped her sit down in my chair.

Miss Rodgers had gone pale and ended up backing away until she hit the wall behind her. “Holy crap, they did give them combat mods.”

I managed to get Rose calmed down enough to let her have a good cry and wondered what Miss Rodgers had been thinking. Didn’t she know the girls with red hair to match their flower names had bad tempers?

4 =

The large man was named Captain Vinge and he had us all out in front of Fairmont house the next day near the landing pad. I was more interested in the flower beds out front since Miss Thorn had never had me work out front.

The Flowers were all shades different shades of blue since the Alon family liked that color, and the Flower girls who worked out front had to have hair that matched.

All the visitors and their big transports parked out front but they just didn’t hold my interest.

Captain Vinge was very shouty. Every one of his words somehow was loud enough for all one thousand of us to hear.

"Listen up. As a temporary measure, we are shipping all of you to the Castelnaudary Emergency Training Facility on Fidel. The department of the Frontier is in no way, shape, or form prepared or trained to deal with twelve thousand children who have better physical adaption modifications than anything we have seen before."

“Once there we will put you through the same remedial training we give the people from the recovered worlds who sign up for the Terrain Marines. You are not becoming Marines, that takes more training.”

“I know that none of you want this. We are taking you away from the only home you have ever known, but as much as you may hate this, you will get to stay together. You will get what the Twelve familys denied you. You will be safe and get to live long healthy lives as free people.'

Looking around at our blank faces, he almost reluctantly added. “Helping you this way is our work, it’s what we have to do before we get to wash, eat, and sleep.”

I help up my hand. The words, “Her again…” seemed to slip out from the large man.

"I want to do this work. The Marine work. I want to stop people from being killed when they turn five. How do I become a Marine girl?"

Several other girls and some boys began to nod. Others began to look thoughtful. The large man looked right at me and narrowed his eyes.

“Be a bad girl. Ask questions and learn enough to ask more. Demand to know how old you have to be before you’re allowed to be an adult, and then keep asking them why you have to wait that long. Then talk to a recruiter. I’ll tell them you’re coming. I got the feeling they'll need the warning.”

After that we all had to get onboard the transports to a big ship, it seemed worn out and old, but it did at least have a window. That where I got a look at my world for the very fist time.

It was very green and blue, with a lot of clouds. I hope I get to come back one day.

I don’t trust anyone other then my sisters with my garden.