Level Up Bitch Read online

  Level Up Bitch

  Intergalactic Pest Control™ Case 002

  NM Tatum

  Sarah Noffke

  Michael Anderle

  Level Up Bitch (this book) is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  Copyright © 2018 NM Tatum, Sarah Noffke & Michael Anderle

  Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing

  A Michael Anderle Production

  LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  LMBPN Publishing

  PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy

  Las Vegas, NV 89109

  First US edition, November 2018

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Sarah’s Author Notes

  Michael’s Author Notes

  Acknowledgments

  Books By Sarah Noffke

  Books By Michael Anderle

  Connect with The Authors

  The Level Up Bitch Team

  Thanks to the JIT Readers

  Angel LaVey

  Mary Morris

  Nicole Emens

  John Ashmore

  Misty Roa

  Crystal Wren

  Danika Fedeli

  Thomas Ogden

  Micky Cocker

  If I’ve missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  Jen McDonnell

  Dedication

  For all the gamers out there who had to get “real” jobs.

  Chapter One

  There is nothing better than closing a huge account. The rush, the high you get when the client signs his name on the dotted line. You can practically hear your bank account filling up. It’s the greatest goddamn feeling.

  And Wes Moony was feeling it right now. Oh man, he was feeling it deep. Because he hadn’t just landed any client; he’d landed the biggest client of his career, the latest in a long string of big clients: the largest producer of performance enhancing nanites in the galaxy. They were his, and so was their money.

  Everyone on Jasob was in the throes of that feeling of victory. The entire station was in the midst of the biggest office party Wes had ever seen—three different caterers, an open bar, and some “party favors” brought by a rep from one of the pharmaceutical companies Wes had also landed recently. There was hardly an un-dilated pupil on the whole station.

  Wes had just popped another party favor when Sinclair Thomas, the Jasob CEO, called all the employees into the main conference hall. Wes’s legs seemed to be moving without him, doing all the work so he could relax and enjoy the ride.

  The crowd of Jasob employees was buzzing with an energy that tickled every part of Wes’s body. It danced on his fingertips, tasted like honey-soaked cake. He bumped into Sherry from accounting, a curvy brunette that laughed with her whole body. He started to apologize, but she forced the words back by shoving her tongue into his mouth. She pulled away just as he got a taste of her and was swept away by the river of Jasob employees flooding toward the stage that was erected at the front of the room.

  The energy dancing across Wes’s body intensified.

  Sinclair walked onstage with all the flair and circumstance of a rock star. And he was greeted as such. The people who spent most of their lives tucked in their cubicles, heads hanging, retinas burning away as they stared at monitors, wrists twisting and aching as they tapped away, had become a hedonistic mob.

  Sinclair paused center stage and looked out at his people. He raised his arms in a dramatic gesture and signaled the launch of an impressive suite of pyrotechnics. The conference hall filled with thick smoke. The mob sucked it in like a cloud of weed smoke before the ventilators pumped it all out to prevent it from suffocating them.

  “My people,” Sinclair declared. The crowd erupted. “We have done it. You have done it.” He paced the stage, building the energy in the room with each lap. “Jasob now has controlling market shares. We are number one!”

  The crowd exploded again. The riotous applause and cheering morphed into a symphony of drug-induced color. Wes could taste their joy. It tasted like butterscotch.

  “But, before I get into the details, let’s take a moment of silence for our comrades at StrobeNet.” Sinclair folded his hands in front of him and hung his head. As the crowd began to mimic him, he threw his arms wide and shouted, “Just kidding! Fuck them!”

  The conference hall filled with more cheering. More color and butterscotch.

  Wes put his fingers to his neck, feeling his pulse. It felt like a snake crawling beneath his skin in rhythm to the blink of the lights above. Fast, fast, slow. Fast, fast, slow.

  “Shit,” he said to himself. “I took way too many of those party favors.”

  “Those StrobeNet bastards are out on their asses today,” Sinclair continued. “Their shiny, state-of-the-art space station, the so-called ‘future of corporate technology and innovation in the industry’ is nothing but vapor. They failed miserably as possible, and the free market does not tolerate failure. StrobeNet’s clients began jumping ship immediately, and we were there to capitalize. We poached client after client, fighting tooth and nail to keep them from the losers at Layton and Chrisoff. And, as of this morning, we succeeded. The last of StrobeNet’s clients are ours!”

  An assistant strolled onstage carrying a blue sack like she was Santa Claus. She opened it and held it out for Sinclair. He reached in and pulled out a handful of small, black tech boxes. He threw them out over the crowd like he was sprinkling feed over chickens.

  “And that kind of diligence is always rewarded. Stellar-Art chips for all!”

  The crowd surged toward the rain of swag. They elbowed each other, clawed at each other to reach them.

  Animals, Wes thought, though he felt the need for the art chips swell in his chest.

  He imagined his coworkers as mice. He became a cat. He batted them around, played with them before sinking his teeth into their necks. All the Stellar-Art chips were his. Everything was his.

  “Wes Moony!”

  His heart felt like it had been dropkicked from the inside of his chest. It had transformed into a rabid coyote, howling and running headlong into his ribs, bashing its own brains outs.

  Every eye in the conference hall suddenly fell on him, pounced on him.

  “Let’s give him a hand!”

  The room erupted at Sinclair’s direction.

  The noise wasn’t a symphony anymore. It was a riot of breaking glass, screeching tires and toppled trash cans. It smelled like burning garbage and tasted
like ash.

  Sinclair pointed to Wes. “This hardworking son of a bitch landed five of StrobeNet’s largest clients. We are number one now because of him. And for that—” Sinclair motioned to someone offstage. A second later, the same assistant who’d brought the blue bag drove onstage atop a new Zenith Astrobike. “I am sending you home with one of these!”

  Wes’s rabid coyote heart went still. It turned into a fluffy, white bunny. Twitching nose. Cotton tail. Cutest goddamn thing you’ve ever seen. He tasted butterscotch again.

  “Head on backstage to claim this sexy beast, Wes. You’ve earned it.”

  The applause built as Wes waded through the crowd. It crawled into his ear and planted seeds that bloomed into flowers.

  “Sweet fucking Uranus, I need to come down,” Wes said to himself.

  He finally made it through the crowd, to the relatively calm and quiet area backstage. The assistant showed him to his new bike—the sweetest ride he’d ever seen, with hover capabilities, autopilot functionality, and speed settings that couldn’t possibly be legal on most planets.

  But once the assistant left him alone to enjoy his prize, rather than mount the thing and let the joy flow through his body, he fell onto his ass and buried his face in his hands.

  “Be cool,” he repeated to himself. He focused on his breathing and on the cold sweat forming on his brow. “This is a reward. I’ve worked hard. I’ve earned it. This is what I work for.”

  He wiped away a bead of sweat before it rolled into his eye. That’s when he noticed the crate. A wooden box that stood waist-high and was big enough that he could have crawled into it if he wanted to. And he kind of did want to. But it wasn’t the crate itself that had caught Wes’s attention; it was what was written on the side of it: Layton Corp.

  Their competitor, one of the ones from whom they’d just sniped StrobeNet’s clients. Backstage at the celebration for beating Layton Corp for market share was an odd place to find a crate with their name on it.

  Wes rubbed his eyes and looked again, making sure he was seeing what he thought he was seeing. When he pulled his hands away, the words were still there, illuminated by the lights dancing across his vision.

  A little noise reached his ears underneath the muted sounds of the celebration on the other side of the curtain. A scratching. And then a lot of scratching. He closed his eyes again, hoping the sound was a hallucination that would fade away. It wasn’t. It didn’t.

  He followed it to the crate and knew that it was coming from inside. He approached the container like it held a bomb or a wild animal and he was hoping not to trigger it. He nearly wet himself when something scurried across the top of his foot. He jumped and squealed like a child. Then he caught a glimpse of the creature. It resembled a mouse—furry and about the same size—but it was definitely not a mouse. It ran off, disappeared under the stage.

  Before Wes could sit, a pack of dozens of those same creatures rushed past him, all disappearing under the stage like the first. The sight of them, their quick movements and sudden disappearance, made his heart frantic again.

  He leaned against the crate and focused on his breathing. His heartbeat matched the rhythm in the crate. Thump, thump, bang. Thump, thump, bang.

  The cheering on the other side of the curtain became a sound of alarm. And then it became screaming.

  Chapter Two

  Sonic was broke to shit.

  But that’s what happened when you got swallowed by a behemoth bug queen and then blew up a trillion-dollar space station. The ship the Notches loved so well was falling apart, and Joel was doing all he could to keep it together until they found a port.

  “Yo, hand me that duct tape.” He pointed to the shelf behind Reggie.

  Reggie tossed it to him, and Joel pulled a strip off and placed it over a gash in one of the coolant lines. The engine was the section that had been hit the hardest. There was damage all over Sonic—punctures in the hull, entire sections of armor torn off, cracked monitors—but the engine room was the heart of the ship, and Sonic was in the throes of a full-on cardiac arrest.

  “So glad we have such a genius engineer onboard,” Reggie said.

  “This shit can bandage anything,” Joel said, admiring his handiwork. “Given enough time, I could make you a spacewalk suit out of duct tape. Then you could float away, and I wouldn’t ever have to hear your judgy voice again.”

  Reggie laughed off the comment. “Good, then get the ship taped together, because we’ve got another job to get to.”

  “Hold up,” Joel said. “I said it’s a bandage. It can keep Sonic from falling apart completely, but it won’t fix the problem. We need to dock somewhere and make real repairs.”

  Reggie surveyed the engine room, pretending to thoroughly examine the complex machine that kept them afloat. Joel was the techie; if he said they needed repairs, then they needed repairs. But Reggie wanted to keep moving. He wanted to get on to the next job and get some cash in the bank.

  “What do we need?” he asked.

  Joel let out a heavy sigh. “We can make it a while with the hull breaches if I seal them as best I can, but that’s temporary. Eventually, if they’re not sealed properly, they will get bigger, and I won’t be able to maintain them. We’ll get torn open like a tuna can and vented into space.”

  He waved a hand at the engine, like dismissing it as already dead. “But this is our real problem. We stressed the engine too much when we were outrunning that nasty queen. We overloaded components of it, overheated everything. It’s a miracle it’s even operational. I can only blame my superior engineering skills for patching the sucker. However, if we try to run a hard burn with it in this condition, it will explode. Hell, it might just explode anyway. We’ve basically got a giant ticking bomb strapped to our ass.”

  Reggie nodded, trying to keep his face from betraying how terrifying that sounded.

  “Oh,” Joel added, “and the microwave is broken. Unrelated, but equally as important.”

  The two left the engine room and made their way to the galley, where Cody and Sam were scrounging for something to eat.

  “Not a goddamn thing for breakfast on this tin-piece of shit,” Sam grumbled as she slammed cupboard doors.

  “Fun fact,” Cody said. “Sam gets real hangry.” He held up his hand for the guys to see. The toilet paper wrapped around it showed three spots of blood. “She stabbed me with a fork.”

  “You tried to eat the last of the oatmeal,” Sam said. “When are we making a supply run? If we don’t get some food soon, I may be doing more than just stabbing Cody with my fork.”

  Cody fell silent as his face turned a pale shade of green.

  “I’m going to eat you,” Sam clarified.

  Cody swallowed hard. “I got that.”

  Joel listed off for Cody and Sam all the problems with Sonic that needed repairing. “If we don’t get all of that fixed, nobody’s eating anybody, because we’ll all be dead.”

  “Can we stop talking about cannibalism?” Cody said. “I’ve got a weak stomach.”

  Reggie waved his arms like he was signaling for help. “Listen, none of that matters right now, because we don’t have money for food or repairs. We’re broke.”

  The Notches looked at him like an alien had just popped out of his chest.

  “We just eradicated an entire space station full of ShimVens,” Sam said. “And a queen the size of a small planet.”

  “Unfortunately, we also eradicated the space station,” Reggie said. “Apparently StrobeNet doesn’t have a bunch of those just lying around. I caught the news last night. That station was meant to be their flagship, the most advanced station ever built. It was a major hub for all of their business. Once news broke that it blew up, StrobeNet’s stock took a nosedive. They’re totally bankrupt.”

  “Meaning?” Sam said.

  “We’re shit out of luck,” Joel said.

  Sam stabbed her fork into the counter. The guys backed away from her like she was a hungry wolf, snarling her d
ispleasure.

  “Okay,” Reggie said, trying to soothe the beast. “Be cool. We’ll figure this out.” He turned to Joel, but was careful not to put his back to Sam. “How long can we go with the ship as is?”

  Joel shrugged. “Hard telling, not knowing. I’ve patched everything as best I can. Best-case, it holds for a couple days. Worst-case, it explodes the second we kick the engines into gear.” He cast Sam a cautionary glance. “Actually, that’s the second worst case. Worst-worst-case is Sam eats us. So I vote we risk it.”

  “We’ve got a job lined up,” Reggie said. “I say we take it, make the repairs to the ship, stock our pantry, and move on from there.”

  That seemed to settle Sam and Joel slightly, but it only agitated Cody.

  “Can we talk about the massive corporate conspiracy first?” Cody looked from Joel to Reggie, both rolling their eyes. “Or, at all, even?”

  “Let it go, man.” Joel sounded tired by the topic. He swiped a piece of stale bread when Sam diverted her attention to Cody, and took it to the corner of the galley. “There is no corporate conspiracy.”

  He knelt down, pretending to tie his shoe, and snuck the hunk of bread to General Pepper, his as-of-yet unidentified, but absurdly adorable pet.