London är relativt unikt i berättelsen med tanke på hur långt den är från dess naturliga jaktområden. Som jämförelse är tysktalande städer mycket lyckligare att vara allierade och erbjuder ömsesidigt skydd. Detta inkluderar uppenbarligen att mindre "handelsstäder" kan gruppera runt dem.
And so the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft was born. The twelve great cities, swiftly joined by others, swore that they would eat no mobile town until the Green Storm was destroyed. They would survive instead by devouring Mossie ships and forts and static settlements until they had made the world safe again for Municipal Darwinism, which every civilized person knew was the most natural, sensible and fair way of life ever devised.
They turned, they fought, and they forced the startled Green Storm to a stalemate. Now, a broad ribbon of no-man’s-land wriggled across the Hunting Ground from the southern fringes of the Rustwater Marshes to the edges of the Ice Wastes, marking the boundary between two worlds. To the east of it the Green Storm were struggling to plant new static settlements and reclaim for their farmers land which had been ploughed up and polluted by centuries of Municipal Darwinism. To the west, life went on almost as before, with cities hunting towns and towns hunting villages; the only difference was that most mayors sent a portion of their catch to feed the Traktionstadts.
Som sagt, erkänner de att när det omedelbara hotet om det gröna stormen har passerat, kan de återvända till kommunal darwinism som anses vara det lämpliga och föredragna tillståndet av att vara.
Du kanske också vill notera att tanken på satellitstäder har testats tidigare, men under senare tidsåtgångar har allting blivit alltmer centraliserat. Städerna handlar dock med London, förmodligen ger detta dem ett begränsat skydd.
Whatever the town was, it was small, only a suburb really. Tom amused himself by trying to work out what it might be while Hester picked the lock on a hatchway and led him up a long stairwell with rusty walls that steamed in the heat from the engines. He thought it looked a bit like Crawley, or Purley Spokes, the suburbs that London had built back in the great old days when there was so much prey that cities could afford to build little satellite towns. If so, it might have its own merchant airships, licensed to trade with London.