Luna had been counting closures since the second hour and she had the number before anybody asked her for it. Every wound the corridor had put into that body had shut inside four minutes, and the four minutes had not varied once across three hours.
A regeneration that takes a constant time is not a regeneration at all.
Living tissue closes at a rate that depends on the damage, which is why a deep cut takes longer than a shallow one in every animal anybody has ever recorded. Four minutes for a plate crack and four minutes for a forty-centimetre seam is a system running to a schedule.
A system of that kind runs on hardware, and hardware sits in a location.
That is the whole of Luna Marr's contribution to the engagement, and it is the reason the mantis is dead. She did it at a gatehouse table with four relay feeds, a stopwatch, plus a surveyor writing timestamps beside her.
She had the count standing at six by the start of the fourth hour.
