Free Haze and the Hammer of Darkness by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

ground.
    Several minutes passed before he determined the approach to the water that would disturb the vegetation the least. He walked north almost forty meters. There he walked along a line of mostly buried black lava, and then picked his way from rocky point to rocky point until he stood on a flat boulder that overlooked the water. He flicked out the microfilament probe and let the stream flow over and around it until the monitoring unit flashed. Then he stored the data and retracted the probe.
    After carefully retracing his steps back to where he had left the bike, he looked back out over the river. He certainly hadn’t seen any sign of gross thermal or other pollution, but the master systems would compare the water temperatures and composition to the river’s environmental profile, once he returned and linked the monitor to the system. He continued to study the riverbed for several minutes longer, but nothing changed, and there was no one nearby. To the north he thought he’d seen a heron, or some sort of crane, but he wasn’t certain.
    Roget took the bike and rode southward down Riverside Parkway West. He didn’t want to go through the process of riding back to the tram station, folding the bike, going two stations, then unfolding the bike, and riding back out east and south again. It wasn’t that hot yet.
    The parkway wound more than he’d realized. He rode close to five klicks before he reached the second monitoring point, just east of where River Road ended at the parkway. Reaching the water was easier there because there was a nature overlook.
    Just as he had finished his monitoring and was walking back to his bicycle, a group of youngsters appeared. They were escorted by a young woman—a teacher, Roget thought.
    â€œGood morning,” he said politely.
    â€œGood morning,” she replied with a smile.
    After he had passed the group, behind him, he heard the teacher.
    â€œWho was that, class?”
    There were various answers, all politely framed, before the woman’s voice replied, “He’s an environmental monitor. You can tell by the white uniform and the monitoring unit at his belt. He was checking the river. That’s to make sure everything is as it should be.…”
    Roget mounted the bike and rode farther westward on the parkway and then continued south until he reached the point where the dry Santa Clara wash joined the river—close to another six klicks. There he repeated the monitoring process.
    After he finished, he took a long swallow from the water bottle at his waist and looked out to the south. It was still hard to believe that the blistered expanse of red clay and sand, dotted with scattered cacti and occasional tufts of some sort of desert grass, had once held thousands of dwellings and other structures. Or that hundreds of thousands of Saints—as many people as some main Federation locials—had populated the area. That had been before the wars and the Reconstruction, of course. St. George hadn’t been funded for reconstruction by the Federation. All the work done in the area had been by Saint volunteers, and the Federation had only grudgingly accepted the environmental results, and only because the outcome had been to keep the Saints, who had been a quiet but destabilizing factor in the fall of the American republic, somewhat more isolated. That wasn’t exactly what the briefing materials had said, but Roget had read between the lines.
    He replaced the water bottle, then checked the monitor for the map and coordinates of the other sites he needed to check and verify. Three of the shops were north and slightly west of him along Bluff Street, in the area reserved for commerce. He was getting hot, and he decided to ride the bike to the south station and let the tram carry him north to the station closest to the southern-most shop on his list.
    The station turned out to be only a quarter klick or so from the river, but he found