Free Ambush by Sigmund Brouwer

to see into the middle of the room, I knew the scanner was not much different from the metal detector wands I’d seen in movies.
    â€œAfter this,” I heard Ashley ask, “what next? How do you get back to Earth? How do you know you won’t be arrested?”
    Computer cables hung from the desk, falling in loose coils on the floor. To me the cables looked like massive tree trunks, with the surface rough enough for me to climb them. So I reached up with one of the ant-bot’s tiny arms and began climbing.
    â€œHow are you going to get away with this?” Ashley persisted. “I thought you were much smarter.”
    Arm over arm, I pulled myself upward. Rawling had once trained me for this in my regular-size robot.
    I guessed Ashley was asking Dr. Jordan questions to distract him. She didn’t know what I was doing, but I’m sure she wanted to delay him.
    â€œI mean,” she continued, “you can’t stay on Mars forever. And you’ll be arrested as soon as you step off the shuttle.”
    I kept climbing. I didn’t expect Dr. Jordan to respond.
    But he did. I guessed he was probably too vain to want a girl Ashley’s age to think he was stupid.
    â€œThere’s plenty of places I can hide on the Moon-base,” he said. “And that’s where the shuttle will make an unexpected stop. From the moon, I can take any number of daily flights back down to Earth.”
    The Moon-base, I thought. It had been established 10 years before the Mars Project. With short shuttles making it easy to deliver supplies and work parties, it now covered the size of a city, while the base on Mars was still little more than the original dome.
    I heard the beep-beep-beep of the scanner. I was three-quarters of the way up the cable.
    â€œAha,” Dr. Jordan said. “Hidden in your hair!”
    â€œThat’s a hair clip,” Ashley said. “I can save you the trouble. I don’t have the ant-bot.”
    â€œNice try,” he replied.
    I reached the top of the cable. The ant-bot wasn’t tired, of course, because robots never tire. They run until the power pack is depleted. I hoped that either a robot this small was very efficient or that Ashley had charged the power pack recently.
    â€œTold you,” Ashley said. “Hair clip.”
    That let me imagine the scene in the center of the room. If her arms were taped to the armrest of a chair, Dr. Jordan would be leaning over her, disappointed to find only a hair clip.
    I scurried across the desk in the shadow of the computer. It was like walking along the bottom of a massive building.
    The scanner beeped again.
    â€œAnother hair clip,” Ashley said.
    I ran beneath the shell of the computer. It was much dimmer, but I could look up and get enough light through the tiny cooling vents. There was a gap in the underside of the computer shell. It would allow me to climb into the computer, except the underside was too high for me to reach. Like a person standing beneath a ceiling.
    And even if I got in there, what could I do to short-circuit it?
    That’s when I realized I had asked exactly the right question.
    Short-circuit.
    Safely hidden, I surveyed the top of Dr. Jordan’s desk. There was a pen, looking like a log to me. And a paper clip.
    The pen was almost right beside the computer. I scampered out and pushed one end. I felt very much like an ant as half of the pen slowly rolled beneath the computer.
    â€œHow do you know that someone else didn’t take the ant-bot?” Ashley asked from the center of the room, her voice echoing weirdly. “Because I can tell you that I don’t have it.”
    â€œNo one else but you or the wheelchair kid can use it.”
    â€œWhat if someone decided to use it as proof of the existence of your secret military program? What if the right people on Earth somehow found out that you’ve taken billions and billions from government programs?”
    I heard the