The Trade of Queens by Stross Charles

Author:Stross, Charles [Stross, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2010-03-31T22:00:00+00:00

“Conflicting mission objectives: check.” Click. Yul shoved another cartridge into the magazine he was filling. “Flashing wads of money around in the middle of a revolution while guilty of looking foreign.” Click. “Micromanaging boss trying to run things on impulse.” Clack. He squeezed down on the last cartridge with a quiet grunt, then laid the magazine aside. “Have I missed anything, bro?”

“Yes.” It was either the coffee or pre-op nerves: Huw was annoyed to find his hands were shaking slightly as he checked the battery level on the small Pentax digital camera. “We’ve got a six-month deadline to make BOLTHOLE work.” (BOLTHOLE was the name Brill had pinned on the current project; a handy identifier, and one that anticipated Miriam’s tendency to hatch additional projects.) “Then all the hounds of Hel come belling after our heels. And that’s before the Americans—”

“I don’t see what you and Her Maj are so worked up about, bro. They can’t touch us.” Yulius stood, shrugging his coat into shape.

“We disagree.” Huw slid the camera into an inner pocket of his own jacket. “You haven’t spent enough time over there to know how they think, how they work.” He stood up as Yul stowed his spare magazines in a deep pocket. “Come on, let’s go.” He slung a small leather satchel across his chest, allowed it to settle into place, then gave the strap a jerk: Nothing rattled.

It was a warm day outside, but the cloud cover threatened rain for the afternoon. Huw and Yul headed out into the run-down farmyard—now coming into a modicum of order as Helge’s armsmen cleared up after the absent owners—then down the dirt track to the highway. The road into town was metaled but only wide enough for one vehicle, bordered by deep ditches with passing places every quarter mile. “They make good roads,” Yul remarked as they walked along the side. “Not as good as the Americans, but better than us. Why is that?”

“Long story.” Huw shook his head. “We’re stuck in a development trap, back home.”

“A what trap?”

A rabbit bolted for safety ahead of them as the road curved; birds peeped and clattered in the trees to either side like misconfigured machinery. “Development. In the Americans’ world there are lots of other countries. Some of them are dirt-poor, full of peasants. Sort of like home, believe it or not. The rich folks can import automobiles and mobile phones but the poor are just like they’ve always been. The Americans were that way, two hundred years ago—somewhere along the way they did something right. You’ve seen how they live today. Turns out—they’ve tried it a lot, in their world—if you just throw money at a poor country and pay for things like roads and schools, it doesn’t automatically get better. The economists have a bunch of theories about why, and how, and what you need to do to make an entire nation lift itself up by its own bootstraps … but most of them are wrong. Not surprising, really; mostly economists say what the rich people who pay them want to hear.

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