Intruder Alert

Back on Site B, the InGen Team was working itself into a frenzy of activity. Over the last week or so, they had been supervising the capture or putting down of various dinosaurs, the arrival of construction materials and workmen to the island, the refurbishing of the laboratory and worker's village etcetera. Peter Ludlow, Roland Tembo, Miles Lee, Felix Zaliky, John Dice, and all other members of the first expedition to the island had stayed on the island all this while, making sure that progress never came to a standstill. They were working at such a state of excitement that the island literally never slept. As soon as the day shift workers left, the night shift workers immediately picked up where their daytime counterparts had left off.

Fatalities from encounters with Site B's indigenous carnivorous dinosaurs were uncomfortably common during the first few days after they had managed to hack into the old Site B network computer system, and had established their home base at what had once been the worker's village. The number of workmen who had died in the first few days had been shocking, with the mean number of deaths per day being eight men. The carnivorous species that had been causing the deaths had all been driven back into extinction, including the velociraptors, tyrannosaurs, and spinosaurs- which had all been shot dead and their nesting sites destroyed, down to the last egg. The only exceptions to the carnivore killing rules were the carnotaurus and the suchomimus, which were nearly impossible to track down and kill due to their extraordinary chameleon-like camouflage abilities.

All the dinosaurs that existed on Site B were either captured or running free. Those that ran free included the dimetrodons, the herrerasaurs, and a small group of five female velociraptors-which had escaped being shot by Ludlow's men. Most of the captured dinosaurs had been locked up in the fragile-looking, and painted an absurd blue color, but amazingly strong ConstruPorta Cages. These cages could be snapped together in many ways, just as a little child might assemble his Lego blocks into building what his imagination made up. The cages were durable, and could be assembled to fit dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes. They just needed the dinosaurs to be tranquilized while the cage's bars were snapped into their sockets. The other captured dinosaurs had been integrated into their paddocks, but only the small species.

Ludlow himself was usually on-site with John Dice (who doubled as InGen's official on-site quantity surveyor) whenever there was construction going on. Occasionally, construction work would be interrupted by a stampeding herd of dinosaurs- which were getting rarer due to the InGen team capturing every one of them and killing off those which they deemed unnecessary. Today, Ludlow was supervising the construction of the new electric fence network, and the digging of the new moats. The workmen were quickly and efficiently manning the gigantic Caterpillar earthmovers, backhoes, and cranes that were the construction equipment. The new fences were twenty-five feet high, and could conduct up to 20000 volts of electricity. The moats were up to thirty feet in depth, and were never less than twenty feet in width.

"Not there! The fuse box goes there, not there!" shouted Dice, as he watched the workmen installing a fuse box for the fences. They had designed the new security systems such that to turn off the fences, you would have to first use the computer to issue the command, which would then disengage the electric lock on the fuse box which you have selected from a list of fuse boxes. You would then have to go to the fuse box and manually flip the switch to deactivate the fence segment in question. There would be twenty five separate paddocks, and hence twenty five fuse boxes. The new system had been designed with the purpose of avoiding the Jurassic Park incident, where the fences, which had been easily turned off at the master computer station, had been turned off by industrial spies from InGen's main corporate rival, the Biological Synthetics Company Inc, or BioSyn, for short.

Ludlow watched with slight amusement as the workers moved the fuse box to the location which Dice had deemed suitable. He decided that the amusement wouldn't last, and decided to look over the plans for the fence network again. Going over to the temporary 'Teepee' that had been erected by the workers-it was actually just a canvas sheet tied at the corners to four poles that were planted in a three-meter square-he unrolled the schematic drawings of the island's construction works. The new paddocks had been designed to be shaped like a perfect decagon, or perfectly even-sided, ten-sided shape. The paddocks were arranged in a pattern like a honeycomb, much like a beehive's hexagonal chambers. The current fence who's construction site he was at was supposed to be the gojirasaurus enclosure, and they had just finished the enclosures for the sauropods and large herbivores, such as the ceratopsians, the ankylosaurs, and the stegosaurs.

A 'runner' ran up to Ludlow. 'Runners' were workers who had been issued with motorized scooters, and their job was to carry messages from the worker's village to the numerous work sites around the island. The runner handed Ludlow a small piece of paper, and left with a brisk, "Gracias, senor."

Ludlow read the message. It read, "Intruders detected by sec. cams. in Sect. 18- Felix."

Ludlow scowled. Intruders on his island! He would see to them soon. Walking up to the nearby worker's transport, he hopped into the Jeep Wrangler and said to the driver, a sullen, balding man named Dieguito.

"To the village."

xxx

Grant, Ellie, Malcolm, and Guittierez rowed their raft (which was actually just thirteen lashed-together coconut palm trunks) towards the network of caves on Isla Sorna's shores. The island itself had no beaches, but had a solid enclosing chain of mountains that formed an impenetrable barrier to the island's interior regions. The island was, generally speaking, shaped like a volcano's inverted cone. You had to climb up the steep cliff to access the areas inside. But Isla Sorna had a complex web of caves at the base of its barrier of high cliffs that had been carved out by the sea when the soft rock in certain parts of the cliffs eroded under the tides' persistent pressure. Quite a few of these caves wound up at the river, and they planned to get to the river.

They approached the island's northern side, where they saw the river emptying out into the sea. Rowing towards the river mouth, they saw, after some difficulty, that a large metal fence had been constructed there. The fence was over grown with vines and creepers, making it look like the river was flowing under a layer of vines. They rowed up to the fence and saw that a rusted 'NO INTRUDERS' sign was hanging there. The fence had been cemented to the cliff walls on both its ends, making scaling the fence their only option.

"Everyone ready?" asked Ellie, taking charge.

They nodded, and she started slowly climbing the fence, using the lateral bars as her hand- and foot-holds. She suddenly let out a cry of shock, having grabbed a snake instead of the fence's bars. Throwing the snake into the sea, she continued climbing, and sat on top of the fence. She waited for the others to get to the top of the fence, and they sat there.

"What are we waiting for?" asked Malcolm.

"I'm thinking whether it would be safer for us to climb into the river or onto the river banks," she replied, squinting at the fast-flowing river that was twenty feet below them.

"I say the river banks," said Guittierez, drawing puzzled stares from the others, "Who knows what senor Hamond might have put into the river, yes?"

"You make sense, for a lizard lover," said Ellie, leading the way down towards the river bank, slowly descending form the twenty-foot high fence.

xxx

Meanwhile, in the computer center of Site B, Ludlow was watching the live-time replay of the security camera feeds from Sector 18. Since the cameras only recorded twenty frames a minute, he was seeing recordings of images that had a three-second gap between them. But the three-second interval between frames, however, still allowed him to see four people-three men and a woman, sitting on top of the fence that kept Site B's crocodilian river inhabitants from swimming out to sea. He then saw them, in the camera's disjointed recording view, climb down towards the river bank.

Turning to Felix, who was staring at a massive jumble of programming code, he snapped an order, "Get the capture crews ready. We've got human intruders on my island. Tell them that I have given them clearance to use the dinosaur tranquilizer darts on the intruders."

Before he left the computer center, he added something to his list of orders, which Felix was reading into the PA system, "Tell the workmen to wear their Prehistoric World overalls. Anyone who is seen not wearing them will be suspect to being one of the intruders and will be shot at."

xxx

As Grant, Malcolm, Ellie, and Guittierez moved through the jungle, they heard a faint announcement from a loudspeaker in the distance.

It sounded like, "Equipos de la captura listos. Alarma del intruso. Utilice los dardos del tranquilizante del dinosaurio en los intrusos humanos. Use sus guardapolvos prehistóricos del mundo. Si usted no los usa, le tirarán en como un intruso."

Guittierez went pale upon hearing the announcement, and the others stared at him.

"What's wrong?" asked Ellie, perplexed. What the hell was it with all the Spanish around these areas?

"Ludlow… He… he has given clearance for the dinosaur capture crews to shoot at us with the tranquilizer darts that were designed for the dinosaurs! If one of those hits us, we're dead!"