Koji Talasko

Biography

Koji Talasko (b. ???? - d. ????) was a member of the Star League Defense Force during the closing years of the Star League era. Talasko had reached the rank of General and was serving as Director of the SLDF Special Forces Command when Stefan Amaris launched Operation APOTHEOSIS in 2766, the coup that secured him control of the vast majority of the Hegemony. As commanding officer of the Special Forces Command Talasko was responsible for a range of forces including the SLDF Special Armed Services - commonly known as the "Blackhearts" - the All Weather Combat Corps, commonly known as the "Foul Weather Fiends", and the Special Forces Aero Wing or "Flying Lions".

When APOTHEOSIS began at 1700 hours Terran Standard Time on the 27th of December 2766, Sabik was caught up with the coup along with every other world in the Terran Hegemony. Rim Worlds Republic forces attacked the single Castle Brian on Sabik and the Special Armed Services Training Centre with nuclear strikes, but while the two facilities were damaged, being nuked failed to destroy them completely; the SASTC took heavier damage than the Castle Brian, but the underground bunkers and hangars beneath the SASTC survived.

Visiting the SLDF troops for the holiday season on Sabik was General Talasko; the attacks caught him and the SLDF units on Sabik by surprise, but Talasko survived the initial attacks and personally planned and then led the SLDF counterattack against the Republican forces that had landed. Talasko and his troops weren't able to stop the Republicans from looting the bulk of the raw materials stored on Sabik, but within a few days the SLDF had pushed the Rim Worlds forces off the planet.

Faced with the prospect of bringing in WarShips or drafting in additional ground forces to hunt down Talasko and his relatively small force of Special Forces personnel, the Rim Worlds forces instead decided to disable the planetary HPG and removed every JumpShip in the system. They then left a handful of sentry vessels in place to monitor the system, and left Talasko and his forces isolated, in control of Sabik, but with no way to leave the system and with Sabik cut off from the rest of the Hegemony. Talasko had brought his own assault DropShip with him, which had survived the attacks, and the SLDF still had a number of other intact DropShips available to them, but the SLDF troops had nowhere to go, and had no options other than to try and repair the HPG and to wait for reinforcements.

When Operation CHIEFTAN began on the 14th of July 2772 Sabik was one of the first wave of targets for those forces operating on the Draconis Front. Following the damage inflicted by the nuclear attacks, orbital strikes and bombings inflicted by the Republican forces during the initial coup, the commando forces commanded by Talasko had sheltered tens of thousands of civilian survivors within the Castle Brian and the remnants of Sabik's other military facilities.

The Republican forces had launched three major incursions onto Sabik between the coup in 2766 and the arrival of SLDF liberation forces in 2772; each incursion had been intended to lay the groundwork for Amaris' forces to return to Sabik en masse to reopen the mining operations there, and each incursion had killed more of the population. Sabik was dependent on regular supplies of food and other essentials from offworld, and mere survival had soon become the greatest challenge for those on the planet.

By the time Sabik was liberated much of the population had died due to a number of different causes including hunger, sickness and radiation; Talasko was one of those casualties, who died before the Thirteenth Army reached Sabik.

Bibliography

• Historical: Liberation of Terra Volume 1