As far as your "short" goes, if you ACTUALLY have a short in there, your speed control is probably toast unless you got lucky and it shut off before sending power through the wires.
If you mean it's just not getting power, I've seen a couple of these planes where the wire will actually break loose of the solder on the ESC and cause it not to run. It'll just kind of jump around and do not much of anything.

If either of these cases are true, a new motor won't even solve the problem, so I'd look at those two first.
-Eric