There are various ways to formulate special relativity. The different approaches illustrate various different aspects of the theory so one of the tricks is to choose the formulation best suited to the question you're asking. My own favourite approach is based on the invarience of the proper time, and in fact this answers your question rather neatly.
If you think back to learning about Pythagorus' theorem, this tells you that the distance from the origin to the point in space (x, y, z) is:
$$d^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2$$
Special Relativity extends this idea and defines a quantity called proper time, $\tau$, defined by:
$$c^2\tau^2 = c^2t^2 - x^2 - y^2 - z^2$$
where $c$ is a constant that will turn out to be the speed of light.
The key thing about Special Relativity is that it states that the proper time is an invariant, that is all observers will calculate it has the same value. All the weird effects in SR like length contraction and time dilation come from the fact that $\tau$ is a constant.
So what about that constant $c$? Well the quantity $\tau^2$ can't be negative otherwise you can't take the square root - well, you can, but it would give you an imaginary number and this is unphysical. So suppose we let $\tau^2$ get as low as it can i.e. zero, then:
$$0 = c^2t^2 - x^2 - y^2 - z^2$$
and rearranging this gives:
$$c^2 = \frac {x^2 + y^2 + z^2}{t^2}$$
but $x^2 + y^2 + z^2$ is just the distance (squared) as calculated by Pythagorus so the right hand side is distance divided by time (squared) so it's a velocity, $v^2$, that is:
$$c^2 = v^2$$
or obviously
$$c = v$$
So that constant $c$ is actually a velocity, and what's more it's the fastest velocity that anything can travel because if $v > c$ the proper time becomes imaginary. That's why in special relativity there is a maximum velocity for anything to move. Although it's customary to call this the speed of light, in fact it's the speed that any massless particle will move at. It just so happens that light is massless.