Urrell's own face smarted with dirt, exposure and cold-spreathe. He touched his nose and cheek, felt the crust of grime and chapped skin, and wondered how Agaratz showed no signs of the cold they had been through together.

'Am I? Well, I'll let you in to a secret. I'm pretty sure I'm preg."

SHEPARD: Have you got a minute to talk? MORDIN: Perhaps later. Trying to determine how scale itch got onto Normandy. Sexually transmitted disease only carried by varren. Implications unpleasant.

Yet according to Robb, who has written biographies of Victor Hugo, Honor de Balzac and Arthur Rimbaud, these microcivilizations were not formless planetoids waiting to be swallowed by a giant state, and their inhabitants didnt constitute a shapeless mass of human raw material, waiting to be processed by the huge, mutating machine of political interference and turned into the people conveniently known as the French.