I found the pdf here, site is a little sketch but it works:

https://zoboko.com/download/ro681w6q/sea-of-rust-a-novel?hash=693cbc06ca8283853152c1d8e53f6fd6

I think Mercer was never as good as Britt. That’s a point they seem to make over and over again. That was his first poach. He only did it to get the CPU and RAM he needed. He proabbaly wasn’t that great at killing. Britt was much more ruthless.

Sure, but they're supposed to be super intelligent AIs that made humans obsolete, with wartime experience killing all humans. This is a very human blunder. And even if Mercer is not functioning correctly, what of the rest of his posse? Surely one of the other war vets would chime up about a suboptimal plan.