Both Sable and Ferren went still for a moment.
They knew what the emergency plan was. Every senior church member in Kingsgate had been briefed on it during the first week after they arrived, when Jorik had pulled them into a room and walked them through every scenario in which the main operation could fail.
The food plan's failure was one of those scenarios. The outpost falling was another. Reidar Miller, coming back from a dead world, was not one he had included at the time, but it would fall under the same category.
The primary goal of the food plan had been to turn the civilian population of Kingsgate into a weapon the church could use against the Aegis Phalanx.
Thousands of people transforming at once, all of them becoming monsters that would hit the Aegis from the inside while the church hit from the outside. It was efficient and hard to stop once started because the Aegis could not kill survivors without destroying the thing they were there to protect.
