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.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://eldraeverse.com/2016/09/06/trope-a-day-courier