Holding II, Stone of Endurance.
Cut Year 1 to Year 107, across four generations. Last reconciled Year 393.
The first of us to reach this sphere found the asteroid already adrift. Nobody knows where it came from. They judged it sound and started cutting.
Size
Three thousand seven hundred and eighty-two feet the long way, three thousand two hundred and eighty-one across. We cannot weigh her. The founding survey guessed something above a thousand million tons and nobody has improved on that.
Stores hold a thousand tons.
She was cut for three hundred families, which is twelve hundred people. We have never come close. The most we ever were is four hundred and seventeen, in Year 112. The count in Year 400 is one hundred and sixty-eight.
Layout
Two levels, with rock left in place around them for strength.
Upper level. The Atrium, the Long Gallery with the residential doors off it, both mess halls, the medical wing, and the Command Terminal.
Lower level. The power core, both life support engines, the cooling chambers, and the service spaces. Its deepest run is the Deepward, cut last, and the only place in the fortress where you can see raw rock on all four sides.
The core
Power comes from the core, which puts out like a Mythallar without being one.
Set inside it is a large piece of stone the founders held to be a fragment of Remnar, carried here ahead of the refugees. We record that as belief, not fact, in the manner of Holding VII. The founding documents were written on the understanding that we live inside a piece of home, and they should be read that way. It is why the fortress carries the name she does, and the resolution naming her is one of very few that assembly passed with nobody dissenting.
The residential blocks
Three blocks. Ten floors each, ten rooms to a floor, one family to a room.
No corridor connects them to the rest of the fortress. Each has its own door on the Long Gallery, and the door carries you the rest of the way. That was for containment, not for elegance: a block reached only by its own door can be cut off without anyone having to leave it.
Only Block One has ever been occupied. Two and Three have never been opened, and their doors came off the maintenance schedule in Year 247.
If you mean to fly this fortress, note that an unmaintained door and a sealed block are not the same thing, and condition three in Before You Fly the Stone needs the difference settled. The closures are listed in The Sealed Sections.
The cooling chambers
Deepest defensible point in the fortress, and our largest store.
They are stocked on the standing reckoning that a hundred families shut in together could hold out a month. That assumes the doors hold and the life support engines run. It has never been tested.
Where the plans do not match
Eleven parts of this fortress are missing from the working schematics, or shown differently. That is deliberate and it is not a copying error.
The reconciliation is The Sealed Sections, which needs Elder credentials.
Without those credentials, know this much: ten of the eleven are ordinary closures of the kind any long-occupied place accumulates, and one is not. We say so here because anyone walking a corridor that does not match the plan is better served knowing the mismatch was intended than deciding the plan is wrong.