Trope-a-Day: Courier

Courier: Once common, taking messages everywhere in the planetary Empire where routine caravans didn’t run. Still common today doing the same job on a rather larger scale, because there are lots of exclaves, small colonies and outposts that aren’t regularly visited by anyone in particular, and while the extranet can get a message there, it can’t get some types of physical goods – those which can’t be sent as a recipe and reconstructed at the far end for whatever reason – there. (And also because certain very-high-security data is, by intelligence organizations of appropriate paranoia – never entrusted to any device connected to the extranet, and thus has to be hand-carried wherever it’s going.)

And since they travel through lightly populated or unpopulated regions, often alone, bearing goods of high value… why, yes, they do tend to be notoriously badass.