Friends of students have booked passage on the fishing trawler Harbinger to study the effects of global warming to a pod of Orcas. Things become utterly deadly, when the crew of the ship dredges a newly thawed piece of older Soviet space wreckage. It seems that the Russians experimented animals that are miniature resilient able to withstand the extremes of distance radiation. The creatures lived, but not without mutation. The crew is vulnerable to harshly mutating creatures. And after being closed in ice hockey for 3 years, the critters are not about to offer the warmth of human closeness.