Galactic Gangster (short story)

Galactic Gangster was a short story published in Doctor Who Annual 1974. It featured the Third Doctor, Jo Grant and the Brigadier.

Summary
The Doctor is with Jo and a group of UNIT soldiers in a dark hangar. There seems to be some sort of menace in the darkness: Jo has disappeared and a sergeant collapses from lack of oxygen. The Brigadier drags the man to safety while the Doctor suggests that there is a vacuum in the middle of the hangar. The Brigadier is perplexed: the Doctor has built a sub-space radio and they have come to this point after a set of coordinates were received on it. The Brigadier suggests that the message the Doctor received was for somebody else. He radios around his men deployed in the hangar but none of them has seen Jo. The Doctor reflects that the message came without words or symbols - merely a picture that appeared in his head.

Something appears in the centre of the hangar: a scene of a vast battle in space between two fleets of ships. It ends with a loud peal of sound and the battle scene is replaced with a giant, nine feet tall, holding Jo hostage. The giant says that he will use mankind as slave labour to rebuild his fleets and regain his empire. At that moment Jo screams and the Doctor sets off to rescue her. The Brigadier warns him that it would need an army to overpower such a creature but the Doctor insists that he is nothing more than an intergalactic gangster.

A second figure, similar to the first, emerges into the hangar. The Doctor races forward towards Jo. He looks at all of the energy weapons that the man is carrying, ignores the, and floors the alien with a punch on the jaw. The second figure, grave and mild, says that the last of the galactic conquerors has now been defeated and he will be remade; time will reform around him as though he never was. The kindly alien salutes the humans as his distant ancestors before the two men disappear. While the Doctor ruminates on all of this, Jo goes off to make coffee back at the trucks.

Characters

 * Third Doctor
 * Jo Grant
 * Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
 * The Galactic Conquerors

Continuity
to be added