Holding II, Stone of Endurance.
Standing order. Made Year 22. Amended Year 247 to add the condition on the residential blocks. Otherwise unchanged. The fortress has flown eleven times between Year 281 and Year 401.
This is a fortress that flies. It is not a ship, and everything below follows from that.
A ship that fails under way loses a voyage. This fortress failing under way loses the people living in it.
Six things must be true before anyone sits the helm. They are not advice. The authorisation says, in these words, that a pilot who lifts the Stone with any of them unmet has accepted the consequences personally.
The six
1. The core at full and steady output. Moving draws hard and draws constantly. Do not ask this fortress to move on a core running partial, running on substituted parts, or discharging unevenly. Fix it first, then watch it hold steady for a good while, then lift.
2. Both life support engines running. We carry two because you cannot repair one from outside while under way. One engine is a fortress you can live in. One engine is not a fortress you can fly.
3. Every residential block accounted for and shut. Each block confirmed either occupied and secured, or empty and closed, with its door working from the fortress side. A block you cannot reach is a block you cannot evacuate, and we do not carry one through the Astral in that state.
4. The medical wing working. Confirm the ray apparatus runs before departure. You cannot send an injured person anywhere else once you are under way.
5. Sealed sections released by an Exemplar. Anything under seal must be looked at and released on their authority. A sealed space nobody currently alive can account for is a hazard of unknown size, and the Exemplars would not fly over one. Eleven sections stand sealed. Ten are a formality. The list is The Sealed Sections and needs Elder credentials.
6. A Remnari at the helm. See The Helm and Its Key. There is no way around this one.
Flying her
Near anything with gravity she is slow, and she answers late in proportion to her mass. Inside a gravity well she barely has steerage at all: plan a departure in hours, not minutes.
In the open Astral she improves. Reckon seventy miles in a full day of flight. That will cross this sphere in a few weeks and will outrun nothing.
She will never handle like a ship and should not be flown like one. Pilots who have flown hulls all overcorrect at first. Rhoan Ilketh Deepkeel wrote this in the training log after teaching his fourth:
They all do the same thing. They put in a correction, nothing happens, they put in more, and then everything happens at once. Tell them the Stone has already heard them. She is still deciding.