The Vanished

People in the advance team began to go missing. Not accidents, not getting lost—with full records and strict protocols in place, people quietly, soundlessly, vanished off the roster.

The surface was so quiet, so 'normal,' that by all reason there should have been nothing capable of making a fully armed team member vanish without a sound. Yet people were simply gone.

The disappearances alone were unsettling enough. The question that kept the command up at night was worse: if there is something on this planet that can make people vanish—then would it, perhaps, send them back?