The Great Hunt has an average 0.068% market share per broadcast. For the network’s targets, that’s pitiable. Hardly benchmarks in the cutthroat world of intergalactic entertainment.

It may be due to the channel’s placement among the competition—as it straddles two opponents with similar market targets.

One is for semi-ecological technical documentaries. The sort of factory reels used for higher education or plentiful white noise. Trillions of hours of auto-narrated mechanical process footage ranging from production to deconstruction, recycling to repurposing, the faceless machines wrangled by off-screen AI that were possibly programmed by meaty digits long ago, operating their automatic processes atop uninhabited—rendered uninhabitable—manufacturing planets.

The other channel broadcasts historical entertainment in ancient languages. Preserved, subtitled, where mythical Secret Agent’s conduct espionage, where Prisoner’s attempt escape. Then hokey far-future antics of cylindrical space-ships piloted by grotesque humanoids and sultry damsels, dawning fishbowl helmets and toting rayguns, décolletage deeper than the thin plots. Artifacts-cum-entertainment flash on three-dimensional screens, where deific protagonists meander through their archaic cultural monomyths, extolling untranslatable virtues and archaeological subtext.

Stimulation for forgotten parts of the mind, where singular cultural ethos may exist as some forgotten, suppressed, evolutionary mechanism.

The Great Hunt broadcasts four times during a single standard twenty-four-hour galactic cycle. First shown live, then the pre-taped four-hour program is interspliced with another two hours of media passed down from the mother corporation. That of advertising or pseudo-documentaries, programming meticulously constructed to elicit a wallet’s fight-or-flight reaction. Maliciously cobbled subconscious combinations of primary colors, music interventions, and Pavlovian sequencing.

All for corporate purposes not known beyond board-room executive summaries, but handled with the care of live ammunition at the ground level, on the pleasure-domed planet of Sant-Sarnin, where the program is taped along with thousands of other programs.

Internal marketing shows there is no correlation between viewership among original broadcast time or any of the three repeats, due to the varying orbits and cycles in the rest of the connected galaxy. In addition to targeting markets of the elderly and young single males, the program performs disproportionately well with cultural markets predisposed to martial skill, or those currently experiencing warfare—both by proxy and bilaterally. The only fluke was that of certain Offworld Pan-African Conference segments, who, further research showed, had the program translated by a woman with an exceptionally silky sandalwood voice, and whose automated translation base was purchased for a steal by the mother corporation, return on investment nearly criminal.

And that market share continues to remain disproportionately high.

The Great Hunt’s regular host is Ulysses Montecillo. A wide man of average humanoid stature. His tan skin, pockmarked with stories of shrapnel, is artificially darkened to look warmer under the studio’s lights. Between his facial tattoos of right-angled tribal shapes, a single visually appealing scar draws from his jaw, across his lips, through a nose chipped like a marble statue, and over his eye, now prosthetic with deep blue irises, topping neatly at his bald head.

You’ve seen his face in the digital advertisements, selling silencers with an airbrushed, muted sort of masculine emotion.

Even while on air, he rarely moves. He maintains a statuesque silhouette, building a recognizable semi-geometric mass of man. This persona is buttressed by his voice, that of a reformed smoker’s. Scratchy and mercenary, but not overtly sickening. Research shows, it’s even palatable to women with a history of spousal abuse, a market share sporting an upward trendline as the galaxy’s political situation has grown sour in recent decades.

His modified larynx has been tuned and re-tuned to the correct sub-decibel based on focus-grouped surveys of public opinion. Ones that spit from all corners of the galaxy. With enough power to send a signal of like or dislike back to the radioactive pleasure planet of Sant-Sarnin.

However, this cycle, Montecillo is absent—he has taken ill.

His understudy and possible mistress Mlle. Louise-Florence de Bellegarde instead receives the killer for an interview. One of at least six interviews within the four-hour program. Before was a financier discussing a recent merger turned sour with graphically illustrated stop-loss metrics versus casualties suffered, and after the mare will be a former assassin turned gardener who will discuss home-grown poisons from behind a screen to protect their identity.

The impromptu host stands proud in the green room’s doorway, plastic smile on display, lips tasting of noisette coffee hidden beneath sterile mint-hibiscus perfume. In the mid-afternoon, the blood of positive networking drips from her lips. And she ought to be hungry.

She’s only the former concubine of an industrial magnate, a pharmaceutical mogul on Buluqiya with a penchant for antiquities smuggling. But her role in life has since changed, only recently. All thanks to a certain tattoo’d man—one absent.

And she’s tall. Human, with a naturally radiant olive skintone, like the man she studies beneath—or under. Her professionally done feathered hair is frozen in place, artificially brightened brown eyes lurking beneath false eyelashes. Nose done and redone as many times as the general tastes of the viewing audience have changed, as many times as the consumer reporting has returned with new insights, her beauty reduced to subconsciously-collected thumb-ups or -downs.

The reporter’s skin is soft, the seated mare thinks, too soft to have any true understanding of her line of work. Another corporate stooge, some toiling creature within the hyper-corporate hive of Entertainment, slotted and siloed into a singular role. A specialized tool, easily replaceable.

Dissimilar to herself, the professional killer to be interviewed, the mare muses with superiority.

Yet, “Miss Saturday?” the interviewer interrupts.

The mare grunts in return. Stray brushes of eyeliner touch-up a familiar, scarred equine face, manhandled by the silent android assistant. He puffs base onto her cheeks along with a host of expensive perfumes, adding to the kohl around her eyes, influencing saturation behind the camera lenses to force a marred sorrel coat to pop.

But nothing compensates for the killer’s natural barbarism.

At two meters height, the attempts at beautification are satirical yet emphatic, like always. They’re last-ditch attempts at the hands of Sant-Sarnin’s finest beauticians. Their failure has ended with not only equine frustration, but a busted jade-green vase of plastic lilacs and an azure, serpentine tête-à-tête loveseat perforated with nuclear-tipped rounds, its walnut frame mangled, stomped beneath angry hooves.

Surprisingly, an abnormal amount of destruction for the green room.

“Miss Saturday, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I’m sure one of the assistants provided you the segment’s writeup in advance?”

“Sure,” the mare replies. Simple questions, simple answers, nothing out of the ordinary. The killer cares more about the small amount of credits she’ll be rewarded. That, and the mental conclusion that her reputation may be improved somewhat by her prime-time debut—public relations never a strong-suit for the jet-setting murderer.

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Whatever rapport the corporate stooge hopes to build is lost on the anthropomorph’s prehistoric psyche. The mare’s mind is too gnarled by concussion and spezie abuse to properly appreciate the high-context society in which she sits. The interviewer realizes this and withdraws her claws.

“Great to hear,” the host grins, giving a professional nod. “Now, I’ve got to run, but it’s a pleasure meeting you.”

“Yeah,” the mare grunts in return.

In the mirror, kohl sticks to her cheeks. Her almond eyes are tired, but not bloodshot. She hasn’t spiked spezie for some time, but she feels an entity lurking behind her, as if she’s being watched, some Whispering from beyond the visible horizon.

Equine molars chew into another plastic-tasting anti-psychotic pill before the mare meanders through the facility.

The studio is violent with movement. Cameramen, entrenched, fire volleys of red-blue-yellow lights into the oriented interviewing desks of hand-carved mahogany spoiled with monochromatic gray paint. Microphone operators carry their spears in unison, pikemen assembled in phalanx. Personal assistants disembowel themselves at the behest of those more important, namely the producers who lurk among their ramparts, issuing orders with complex gestures and a disinterest towards the lives of subordinates.

Overbearing lights heat her fur. They broil her alive, searing her eyeliners and makeups, spices blackening her for consumption. The mare’s thirsty, already swallowing out of discomfort as she takes a seat. It’s plastic. Slick, with her own humidity, threatening to have her slide right off.

Twelve cameras sit around her in a parabolic formation, each manned by a similarly sweating corporate peon. They’re robotic. Bitter, failed auteurs. They pluck at their various sensors and inputs like a platoon prepping for conflict. Soldiers that nervously check and double-check parachutes and anti-gravity boots before high-altitude descent.

They vibrate, like the rest of the room, cigarettes jutting out of mouths, against regulations. The room—the dropship’s cabin—flashes with klaxons, reeking with nervous sweat and urine. They’re about to jump, all of them. Flaming oxygen tanks burst after another tuft of anti-aircraft disables the airship entirely, the mare chewing on the screams dismembered hairdressers—no, pilots—at seven thousand meters and rapidly descending. Downwards. Towards the planet of Tiangong, as it will soon be called, its newly radioactive surface choked with wrecked vessels and sandblasted local troops, her ruinous cities still on fire, never surrendering, Imperials stubbornly resisting to the last man.

It’s before the mare’s time, but she can smell it, hundreds of years ago. An Imperial homeworld that once tasted like crushed olives and dried hazelnuts, filled with evergreen undergrowth and beech-tree forests. Now in the heat of battle, burnt and spiteful, soot choking unprotected eyes. Magnificent marble colonnades and statuary toppled. The planet is desecrated, trampled beneath the revolutionary forces she assists.

It’s a vision the mare’s been having lately. One of many. Lost memories, reassigned. Her dosages of antipsychotics—recently upped and re-upped—are losing their potency.

“You’ve really seen it all, at such a young age, too,” the interviewer muses.

The killer pauses. This is an insult. Only on Sant-Sarnin is such an innocuous, offhand compliment an insult.

Venom drips from the universal translator affixed to the reporter’s décolletage. It’s the shape of a simple emerald brooch—a scarab—its outlines heavy and orientale. Anthropologists could explain how the hundreds of millions of manhours poured into such a simple translation device has created a society so heavily dependent on context and body language, how the placement of subject and predicate denote compliment or insult, how the stones of jewelry dictate negotiation outcomes at first arrival. And they have, through the hundreds of holo-books penned, describing how best to find success when dealing with the Sant-Sarninites as an outsider, explanations translated and re-translated into foreign dialect, losing subtext until the clueless reader arrives on the radioactive planet without any discernible knowledge whatsoever.

But the mare speaks enough to realize she’s insulted.

“Thank you,” she fires back. “I’m glad you can step in on behalf of your superior.”

“Anytime. Just making some small-talk. Good for the lungs, you know.”

“I apologize, but I’d prefer if we didn’t.”

“Of course. I don’t mind at all,” the reporter spits.

---

“Hello everyone, welcome to The Great Hunt, the galaxy’s foremost programming on all things martial. Today, I, Louise-Florence de Bellegarde am filling in for Ulysses Montecillo on this cycle’s edition of Hunter, Prey. It’s a pleasure having you here, Miss Saturday.”

“Sure,” the mare hisses with hushed breath.

“Before we begin...” the corporate trails off. She describes products and sponsors, running through the list of objectives that echo in her earpiece. Commands shot down from above, to be followed without failure. The mare sits still.

Pinned.

Twenty-four cameras that surround her, their microphones jutting from between them, silently assault her beneath the lights. She’s face-down in the wreckage again, playing dead on Tiangong’s superheated surface, her facial fur charring with first-degree burns. The opposition mingles around her. They pick over bodies for ammunition and rations. Supplies for the few Imperial insurgents that manage to remain. One is alone, separated, leaning over her, investigating her mangled, yet still-breathing body. She clutches the dagger in her hidden hand, ready to sever his Achilles before his homemade bayonet can pierce her ribs and serrate her lungs.

“So tell me, how do you approach your prey?”

The mare blinks. “Ruthlessly.”

Once more she’s in the recording studio. The dutiful worker ants stand in place, careful to maintain complete silence. They’re unfazed by her questions and answers, focusing intently on the more important aspects of the performance like sound clarity, picture quality, color contrast.

“Doesn’t everyone?” The reporter laughs. “Now, your current prey. An interesting bit about them, they’re a pair! Tell us, have you tracked one of those before?”

“They’re rare, but I’ve turned in one or two. Two mercs during the Okapi Wars, for example.”

“Do they stick together, the prey?”

“Not normally. The pressure gets too much.”

“Is that what happened to the bounty you’re referencing?”

“Yes,” she replies. The mare knows the repertoire is boring. She’s only half here. The other half—the interesting, marketable half—is still on Tiangong. The snap of an Achilles tendon produces the metallic sound of a sardine can’s opening. The killer leans into her words, speaking confidently from her diaphragm, hoping to improve her performance, as she does with any task where she doesn’t meet her own lofty expectations. “When you find pairs, they're normally believed to be inseparable. Maybe they commit the same crimes, believe the same mantras. Study the same sutras. They’re together, for some reason, after all. For these two, they were the same profession. They were Whisperers."

“You mean the telepathically-inclined?”

“Sure,” the mare huffs, “but that’s a catch-all. Telekinesis, telepathy, suggestion, or anything else like that. Takes a lot to learn, a lot of hard studying. I had a few lessons once, where you meditate and fast for a few days in ludus. Didn't find much use.”

“And for this particular bounty...”

“By the time I found them, they were separated. The pressure was too much. Infighting, I assume. Makes the job easier since they're used to someone watching their back.”

“And did that affect you?”

“Yes,” the mare would never admit under torture. Tears want to well in the corners of her kohl-scrubbed eyes. Then a gnawing shout forming in her stomach. She has half a mind to rip the interviewer’s heart out on-air like she stabs in her Tiangong daydream-nightmare.

And they’d probably thank her for the ratings.

“Of course not,” the mare manages. “It’s just a job.”

“So how personal, to you, as a hunter, is a bounty?”

“Not very. They’re meat. Turn one in, and you’ve got another meal.”

“But, is your current job complicated at all by your… Personal connection to the prey?”

“No,” the mare says, to the consternation of the reporter.

“Well,” the interviewer smiles, another insult, “for those who missed our introduction earlier in the program, Miss Saturday, would you like to inform our audience who you are pursuing?”

The mare pauses, chest heaving. She’s in the wreckage, pursued, cornered, shooting impotently into the smoke at the shadowy Imperial figures. Her chest is perforated with automatic fire that eviscerates her antique armor, the metal bending inwards and sending shrapnel through her skin. Shots ring in her ear, the one remaining, other torn, feeling like three-hundred-year-delayed punches to the gut, scattering organs, bursting through the back of her skull. As she winces in pain, the memory comes to its same meaningless conclusion as always, an excruciating pain followed by temporary blindness.

And yet, in the studio, the mare exhales with confidence. It’s a composure You’ve never seen. After all, even looking at her familiar almond eyes, the killer would be a stranger to You. She’s only a filly—a hunter with You as target. A stranger willing to pull the trigger without hesitation.

Like most of the other copy-pasted fillies, You can muse.

“I’m hunting my sister, ‘The Galactic Gladiatrix.’”