Science fiction author Kemi Ashing-Giwa has written a new Halo story. Halo: Foehammer's Last Flight went live on Halo Waypoint yesterday and tells the life story of Carol Rawley, the dropship pilot with the callsign Foehammer, ending in the last minutes before Alpha Halo is destroyed. Check out the official post down below:
Ashing-Giwa's novels include The Splinter in the Sky, which won the Compton Crook Award and became a USA Today bestseller, This World Is Not Yours and The King Must Die. Her short fiction has been nominated for an Ignyte Award, appeared on the Locus Recommended Reading List and been reprinted in The Year's Top Tales of Space and Time and The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction. She is pursuing a PhD in Earth and Planetary Sciences at Stanford.
A Pilot Who Only Finds Quiet In Combat
Rawley grows up on a poor Outer Colony world at the edge of human space in the Orion Arm, where the open-air market runs only 1 day in 5 and UNSC blockades often leave half the goods missing. As a child she cleans her study station before and after class and gets up at night to check every lock in the apartment, and her mother, Jan, cannot afford treatment.
When the Covenant reach her system and burn its sister world, Rawley discovers that fear clears her head. Ashing-Giwa writes: "In chaos, in battle, there was only blessed silence." She enlists in the UNSC, where her fellow pilots mostly come from the comfortable Inner Colonies, and she quietly resents the citizens there who backed crackdowns on the Outer Colonies.
Rawley's closest friend is Frye, another Outer Colony recruit who later becomes her co-pilot. He believes that if humanity survives the war, the UNSC will turn its guns back on the colonies, and Rawley has no answer for him beyond saying she never feels alone with him in the cockpit.
Echo 419 And The Battle On The Ring
Commander Samira Hashem gives Rawley a new D77 Pelican, Echo 419, and the story describes the ship as the first thing she has ever loved at first sight. When the UNSC Pillar of Autumn is lost above the ring, Rawley and Frye lead the squadron's pilots off the ship in their Pelicans while the rest of the crew takes the lifeboats.
A historian's note dates the main action to September 22, 2552, just after the Master Chief and Cortana overload the Autumn's engines. In the game, that is the last mission of Halo: Combat Evolved, where Cortana calls Foehammer in for an evacuation and 2 Banshees shoot her Pelican down. The story opens on that crash and comes back to it at the end.
Rawley has heard rumors that the Spartans were made to crush colonial rebels, and the Master Chief's silence unsettles her. She comes to respect him after watching him fight and seeing that he fights for every human world, not only the wealthy ones.
The Tolkien Name Behind Foehammer
Rawley's callsign comes from Middle-earth. Foe-hammer is the English meaning of Glamdring, the sword Gandalf carries, and the original Combat Evolved credits spelled the callsign as 2 words, close to Tolkien's version. Later Halo material settled on Foehammer. The name also appeared earlier in Bungie's Marathon Infinity, which has a level with the same title.
Tawnya Pettiford-Wates voiced Foehammer in the 2001 game, and that performance was carried over into this year's Halo: Campaign Evolved remake.
Waypoint Chronicles In Print And On The Page
Foehammer's Last Flight is the second of Halo's weekly Waypoint Chronicles for its anniversary month. The first, "Elegy" by Jeremy Patenaude, follows a lone Sangheili who travels to Feldokra and learns family history that changes his loyalties. The series began in 2022 with a story for Halo 4's 10th anniversary, and Halo: Waypoint Chronicles Volume One was announced as a print collection of 24 earlier stories and 10 new ones, as covered in HALO: EDGE OF DAWN Announced, First Print Volume Of WAYPOINT CHRONICLES Coming In 2026.
The same battle on Installation 04 was also the setting for Tim Lebbon's Flood novel last month, covered in Tim Lebbon's Halo: Parasite's Wake Brings Military Sci-Fi Horror To The Ringworld, And It Is Out Now. Alexander Wakeford and Jeff Easterling edited Ashing-Giwa's story, which is free to read on Halo Waypoint.
Would you read a full Halo novel from Kemi Ashing-Giwa, and which side character from the original trilogy should she write about next?
Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.