Sh'daar

The Sh'daar are an alien civilization - or, more accurately, a collection of civilizations - native to the N'gai Cloud, a galaxy that would later become the Omega Centauri globular cluster of the Milky Way. They are focused on the limitation of technology in order to prevent another technological singularity like the one that decimated their culture, and to this end have forged an empire in the Milky Way. They are the primary antagonists of the Star Carrier novel series.

Description
The Sh'daar are not a single species but a coalition of them, and as such have wildly different physical forms. Most, however, live on only as digital "copies" of extinct Sh'daar species uploaded into a vast and interconnected computer network. Those Sh'daar that continue to live biologically are known as "Refusers."

One Sh'daar race, generally used for ground combat, takes the form of ten-meter-high hexapedal creatures, capable of standing on two, four, or six legs. These creatures are covered in powered armor, and it is unclear whether they are living things or machines.

History
The Sh'daar are the remnants of the ur-Sh'daar, an immensely advanced coalition of races native to the N'gai Cloud. Their civilization formed approximately a billion years ago and soon came to encompass the entire galaxy. The u-Sh'daar were spurred into a period of rapid technological advancement by the realization that the N'gai Cloud would eventually collide with the Milky Way. While their lives were not in danger, the collision would disperse the Cloud's stars among the Milky Way and tear their civilization apart. To avert this, the u-Sh'daar began to preserve their minds and bodies as cyborgs, robots, and uploaded minds, while collapsing stars to form wormholes that linked them to the Milky Way

However, this eventually proved to have catastrophic consequences. In a relatively brief period of time, most or all of the augmented ur-Sh'daar "transcended," their bodies (if they had them) apparently dying as their minds vanished from the universe to parts unknown. The Sh'daar who had not augmented themselves were left behind, abandoned in a galaxy bereft of most of its inhabitants and left in a devastated state.

Over the millennia that followed, the Sh'daar recovered. While many of their constituent species went extinct, these species survived as uploaded copies, and others remained in their physical bodies. They eventually used the wormholes built by their ancestors to establish contact with the Milky Way 876 million years in their future - the present day. Hoping to prevent another transcendence, the Sh'daar invaded the Milky Way and began a campaign of conquest spanning at least twelve thousand years.