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.

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.

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

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.